If that operation happens more than a couple of times a year, the organization should have figured out an Excel replacement a long time ago. One possibility is that a human is doing something to each of some significant portion of those rows, in which case more data entry should take place earlier and closer to the business. If that isn't the case, then just write a damn report already!

Actually there is one more possibility, that one or more goofballs in accounting just like to waste time "looking over the numbers and getting a feel for them". This generates lots of spurious questionably-motivated inquiries to business and IT people (who always blame the other party, when only accounting is to blame for their own vague feelings). In that case don't worry about fixing anything at the company, just get a different job somewhere else.

Clearly you are not a power excel user. Excel is brilliant for such tables. The charting,manipulation, etl, and dramatic query functionality are astounding. In the right hands you can do truly amazing things.

That said, there are some great cloud analytics offerings which are going to compete.

Let's stipulate that excel gives you all the chart-formatting crap you need. Is that a reason to pull in a million rows, which is what GP is about? Surely a chart with a million things displayed is going to be awful, no matter how well formatted. A simple shell script could save these users hours of work, every time they touch this godawful sheet. Actual analytics tools would be even better.

Why would you do any of that when it opens up fine in Excel? A chart doesn't display a million things, it summarizes it. End users aren't going to be pumping stuff through shell scripts, and I personally am not in the business of writing office suite software. If people can get what they want, easily without my intervention by paying MS I am all for it. Also I don't want to support the sales department when my bash script streaming their stuff to Spark fails.

The truth is that Excel is easier to learn than programming. Call it 'graphical programming' if you will, but Microsoft did build a very powerful piece of software that performs fantastically great for many data tasks. And many many 3rd parties built extensions (data import, cleanup/statistics, formulas and logical programs) that Just Work.

I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.

Excel is the most successful FP language.

But the excel replacement is a 3 year IT project with a 60% chance to fail and an enormous budget. By the time it is done, the user will have forgotten what this project was even for.

Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.

Part of the promise of cloud based document solutions, to my eyes, is being able to replace "edge databases" with user-facing user-editable spreadsheets.

Drain those IT projects of risk, get moving early, with a structure that lets the user guide the data modelling... Could be a nice local minimum :)

Agree. Well, ideally you would want to give a path for non technical users to do more than spreadsheets. That was the promise of hyper-card, VBA, etc. But that's not the direction of the world anymore, quite the opposite.

Totally agree.

Nowadays you have JS to automate Google and MS docs, but 1) Javascript is kinda warty for VBA-type users, 2) API driven javascript is less friendly than the locally-logical VBA-style access, and 3) the mental barriers to entry are much higher than older solutions to the same issues...

In theory we should be approaching data-nirvana for end users. In reality it takes a lot of tech know how to bridge those gaps in the modern Enterprise and you're getting almost no help from the big boys.

It doesn't matter what the users "should do" when it comes to questions like competition and market share.

Haha no HN partisan group "downvotes for disagreement" like Windoze partisans.