He probably is biased - but it seems they were building "spreadsheet for advanced users" when most people who use a spreadsheet are not or will ever be advanced users.

Apart from “home” use, Excel users usually lack functionality and tend to build an unmaintainable mess in their spreadsheets. Quarter of my ‘system integration’ work came from Excel users trying to automate and/or formalize what they created in there for years. Sadly, these types of businesses take hell of efforts to convert to good information systems; high failure rates are normal there. For me, Excel is a heroin of a business world. It drags you from reality and breaks you when you’re trying to get back into it.

There aren’t enough trained programmers in the world to do in code what all Excel users get done with spreadsheets. Let alone programmers who understand the business of the company they work for.

Spreadsheets exist because it would take programmers weeks to produce, what it would take a afternoon to do it in excel.

Plus most of the time these are one time throwaway efforts done to quickly arrive at results and make decisions.

It will all begin to make sense when we think of Spreadsheet work as programming and not something separate from it.

It's the dream Microsoft Access should've been, but for whatever reason never caught on.

Microsoft tried it a few times, the latest attempt was LightSwitch, recently killed in favor of PowerApps.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/08/03/introduci...

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

The thing is, with Excel the programming is gradual, you first just add some formulas, followed by conditional formatting, small macros, until eventually jumping into full VBA.

Alternatives, including Access, require good programming knowledge from day one.

But I still fundamentally agree with this approach. Perhaps not all users, but most users should be given a path toward more programming based approach to modelling.

I think lighswitch was stillborn when it wasn't distributed as part of office (irrespective of its merits, haven't tried it myself). Asking IT departments to deploy it was bound to fail. It needs to be available at the fingertips of excel users, like VBA is, always there, running with Excel, and you know it is available to everyone else so anything you do will run without having to install anything on their machine.

Powerapps look amazing to be honest. I actually would like to use that and the BI integration, but unfortunately I don't have enough reason to spend money on it. The small organising that I do need ends up in Airtable instead, but that's not even close. (I miss proper graphing features)

>>Excel users usually lack functionality and tend to build an unmaintainable mess in their spreadsheets

Excel needs to be viewed as a programming tool. And a good programming tool is something that gives as much control to the user.

There are many Excel tutorials online and on Youtube that try to teach you how you can do MVC with Excel. That is separate presentation from data, and its control.

Yet there is an enormous amount of important money-work being done by Excel users who are far more advanced than me, building what are essentially computer programs / databases.

So even if that market has fewer users then Excel itself, there an still be money to be made from people who could use a tool that is better behaved than a consumer spreadsheet but easier to use (for domain specialists) than a general programming environment.

This is the argument that (IMO, rightly) people make against the continued use of C for systems programming.

But C aficionados insist they understand its behaviors well enough to not get bitten...

I accept the analogy here between Excel and C, but I think the moral is the opposite.

Excel is very likely a good choice for a lot of people doing complicated stuff with it -- in spite of its problems. It's just that some of those people might also want a niche product that replaces it for some particular purpose. Not an entirely new, general purpose tool.

The problem with using a tool with say 5% of the features excel provides is you sooner or later run into some feature you need, but is absent in the niche tool. You can't exactly split your work between two tools now. So it just makes sense to use the tool with the super set of all the features, even if you don't use all those features all the time.

The right comparison for this would be using some thing like awk/sed compared to using Perl.

I used to work in support for Lotus in the UK. A few people used Improv, but if IIRC once you got beyond a few dimensions the file sizes became huge.

The other alleged reason for Office beating our SmartSuite is the way new Windows or MS Dos releases always seemed to accidentally break Ami Pro or 1-2-3.

Oh god, this 'is biased' trope again. It's tiring. You can just say the first clause of that sentence and the meaning is the same.