Software that does a simple job well is valuable. Excel also brings a bunch of dubious upsell bullshit for a million vaguely related use cases, but "Do some math on a bunch of numbers" is what computers were built for.

The company I work for makes a complicated piece of enterprise software. The tool we made to feed new data into the system is all Excel based. It spits out Excel sheets, you fill them in with your data, and it loads it back in. We use Excel because we asked what people wanted, and every single user said Excel. We have tools to do direct data feeds from other databases, or just about any other data source, but most people use the Excel tool for the initial data load.

Using Excel to tabulate and display data is fine.

A few simple macros are also okay.

But writing complicated macros to encode business processes is dysfunctional.

It is far better to have separate programs in Python, Java, or VB that pull the data from the spreadsheets, and are subject to code reviews and source control.

Table knives are a favourite tool of the DIY world. They're cheap & plentiful, versatile, & useful. In DIY, you can't often know a priori what you're going to need to do around the house. Using table knives is quick and easy. It happens all the time that you realise halfway through a task that maybe you should be using a proper screwdriver to do what you need to do but ah, fuckit; the screw-head's buggered anyway from the last time you used a table-knife as a screwdriver.

If a handyman comes to do

> It's a solution that works and replacing Excel would be a solution searching for a problem.

That's actually not true at all. In many cases Excel does the bare minimum but isn't sufficient. Excel is a great little tool for storing data in a bunch of sheets. But in most situations where a project attempts to replace Excel it's because Excel is too limited in what it does, or the dataset has grown unmanageable, or management has asked to report some new data that can't be extracted from Excel alone, or you need to interface with other databases in ways Excel doesn't support.

There are many problems wi

Probably a journo who needed to put AI into a sentence?

Other than that nobody at all, who actually uses it.

Never a kind word about Microsoft leaves my lips, but SPREADSHEETS are a remarkable tool that is usable by both amateurs and experts for many many different purposes. It is unusually easy to start using and is extensible pretty much as far as you can imagine, as I have seen in my professional life and as many others below point out.... you can do ridiculously complex things with a spreadsheet if you pu

There's plenty of reasons for Excel to die, and plenty of reasons for it not to.

Spreadsheets existed long before computers - they usually were chalkboards of numbers that people edited and others had to recalculate. When VisiCalc came out, this was a breakthrough in that you can update numbers and have the calculations performed automatically.

For things like data analysis, they do things in a quick and easy format. And heck, putting data in a quick tabular format is often a convenient way to organize stuff.

Multi user database. Spreadsheets are incredibly useful but it can be an absolute freaking shit show when people try to make them do things they're not supposed to do. And God help you when somebody discovers VBA and the ability to add buttons and user interface components. I've seen entire multi-user applications built on Excel and nothing else and they work about as well as you would expect

I know someone who had foisted upon them a resource planning tool for managing thousands of employees across multiple sites and groups, completely written in Excel, VBS macros, and the PivotTable extension. You ran the "master sheet" script and it would pull from other workbooks, creating a massive report in the main workbook. It was basically a complex relational database built using spreadsheets, with no constraint or relationship management at all.

Finally their IT department built something to replace it

I assume you're talking about VBA, right?

VBA has been disabled in Excel for years already. You have to go through a bunch of security hoops to enable it, overriding warnings that will make any IT department scream in horror.

VBA macros haven't been an issue since a few years after the "I love you" virus made them an existential security risk.

Ssssshhhh!!! dont warn them of this huge risk, just make some popcorn and wait for the trainwreck it will cause in accounting and IT sectors

To be fair, if it's anything like the ones I produce, it's not that the data doesn't require calculations, it's that the spreadsheet is just the final output format from another process that does the heavy lifting.

The real work is in the database, the XLS file just is an easy way to distribute the resulting data in a way that nontechnical users can filter, sort, and add fields to. But any of the calculations were done behind the scenes creating the file and aren't ever part of the output sheet.

I call that "paper logic for Excel". They don't understand the functionality and just want things to look organized and pretty, but in how it would look if they printed it on paper, but then you can't use Excel's best features with a well designed "paper logic" spreadsheet.

Until the spreadsheet becomes to unworkable due to the # of rows and/or the complexity added over time. I made a good living for years converting cumbersome spreadsheets into multi user database apps for businesses.

Speaking of requirements, I've seen big companies paying expensive Jira/Confluence (and other project management tools) subscriptions to end up managing their projects in colorful Excel sheets. It can not be helped.

This is accurate. It's not Excel. It's spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are highly customizable to a unique situation. Excel is dominant because it's the best spreadsheet tool on the market, the next closest competitor is maybe Google sheets which has dubious functionality IMO.

Every other spreadsheet tool is a niche case useful tool, but Excel is the top.

This. Times 1000.

Taking a small business level application and adding "AI" to it will only multiply the problems.

The problem with Excel isn't Excel. When used by home users and small businesses as intended, it is fine.

But like most of you I have seen large enterprises abuse the shit out of it for stuff it was never intended to do. Don't blame the tool. Blame the carpenter.

There are several enterprise capable options available in the real world for 10+ years which are multi user, multi dimensional, have

You literally can't trust the output of "A.I." to be correct. Ever

Most people don't want "correct" they want the answer they are arguing for.

> You literally can't trust the output of "A.I." to be correct. Ever

True, but you typically do not use machine learning in circumstances where you need it to be 100% correct all the time. For example, in particle physics we use machine learning algorithms to separate signal events from background events. The standard selection criteria that they replace are never 100% accurate in separating the two so you always have to measure the signal efficiency and background rate remaining.

What you can do is measure these parameters for a trained ML algorithm and then trust that i

Over a million? Seriously? Then Excel hasn't learned its lesson and is repeating the same mistake over and over again. We just have to wait for the next disaster, when someone will try to paste two million rows in a new format spreadsheet.

But you're right that idiot users are to blame... but for using Excel in the first place, rather than for incorrect use of Excel (because Excel is laughably easy to be used incorrectly). Their bosses that allowed using Excel for serious data handling are no less to blame.

You mean it allows any yahoo to bang together something in Excel and foist it on people who have no choice but to use his/her pile of rat droppings. The percentage of people who can use Excel well pales in comparison to the legions to think they can but are blindly misguided.

> There are no built in tools for visualizing and managing the complexity

Excel literally has a Python interpreter for complex data visualisations built into it. But then honestly I struggle to come up with a scenario where you need to create and visualise complexity in Excel. The whole point of Excel is literally the opposite, take something complex, simplify it, and then display the simple result.

Despite it's capabilities (like the aforementioned Python interpreter) if you're visualising complexity in Excel you're using the wrong tool for the job.

> Anyone who's had to deal with Google Shits knows why Excel wont die.

Yeah, I've been working on a document I keep in Google Docs for ease of portability. I created a simple little graph for a scenario based on some modified sine waves in Excel. I wanted to keep the data supporting the graph in case I want to change it in the future, so I though just upload it next to my doc. Google did many bad things to my simple little graph that was a much greater pain to fix than in Excel.

Excel also does MONEY incorrectly and every accountant has just gone along with it not knowing except maybe some really old ones long ago who remember banker's rounding and didn't know what a float was. they still don't know what a float is or why you don't store money in one. To think of all the tons of money just floating around ... except for the few who collect it over time... while the rest just don't bother to deal with it.

Money is integer math; in pennies which BTW, almost everything on earth goes d

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic... Numbers is still deficient compared to Excel in many presentation features. Numbers' graphing is sub-par, especially for math/engineering; specifying series for plotting is also painful. You can't do text rotation in cells. You can't have multiple formats (bold, regular, and italic) in a single cell.

Basic stuff like that.