Half of the people I know who love Excel in that way would now be making significantly more money if they didn't. These people fall into two groups:

The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now.

The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up.

On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago. The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well.

They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.

> would now be making significantly more money if they didn't

Er, I think reality is closer to "they would be making significantly more money if they loved python more than Excel".

A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair.

You said "half of the people.. would be making significantly more" and then proceeded with further grouping. I assume the subgrouping applies to that same half?

The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants...

Yeah, perhaps I should have been explicit about the fact that for some people it's absolutely the right tool for the job. My mom loves it, it serves her well, and her use cases don't require her to go beyond its capabilities.

But if fully half (admittedly a subjective assessment on my part) of a tool's users would be better served by not using that tool for one reason or another--that's a pretty significant subset.

Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for years and years!

Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience:

- lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA.

- weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to fix it. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel

- lack of decent built in formula tracing (ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree). There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in.

- lack of a decent way to see what’s changed between two versions of a spreadsheet

I’d also say there’s an inordinate amount of abusing Excel to do database tasks out there. People have spreadsheets which take minutes to recalculate which could be done in less than a second even using Access, let alone a ‘proper’ DB.

You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version.

If you're going to break compatibility, at least fucking fix the dates.

http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html

It’s not new features. Sometimes for no particular reason, a sheet which uses no new features isn’t backwards compatible.

In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.

The great thing about Excel is that it is easy and intuitive to use just the basics, and it is difficult to accidentally stumble onto its advanced and complicated features by accident.

With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.

Yeah that was a very bizarre grouping of software. I’ve never before heard Photoshop or Excel referred to as enterprise.

There is a lot of bad enterprise software out there, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are basically catalogs of it. The fundamental problem as I’ve seen it relates to contracts and integration. Good software, the user can bail at any time.

There is a very simple set of red flags: the company doesn’t list a price, you have to talk to a sales person, and you have to sign a long term contract. I’m not aware of any software that fits those three that is enjoyed by its users.

Regarding Excel, its Mac version is terrible. Our heavy users have to run the Windows version in a dedicated Parallels VM to get anything done once the sheet contains more than a few hundred rows.

i used to be a heavy excel user, when i worked on windows, it was great for eyeballing data quickly, now, in a different job, i use a mac, i would really do anything i can to avoid using excel - visidata FTW http://visidata.org/ . I really don't miss excel at all

I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis.

The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.

Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined.

> big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records

Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone. Somebody needs to get over himself.

But if Google Sheets can't fit the data they are using, it is by definition "big data", even if it's not Big Data. I think this over-protectiveness of the definition doesn't really serve anyone.

It serves everyone to have relatively stable meanings for words and phrases. "Relatively" because of course there is natural drift over time. But if today I write "big data" and it means "millions of rows in Excel" to Bob but "hundreds or thousands of terrabytes" to Jane, it's effectively useless to use in communication.

Put another way, that Bob thinks he's dealing with "big data" doesn't mean he is in fact.

In four lines you manage to be arrogant, insulting, patronizing, and intellectually sloppy (“by definition”?) I'm disappointed. I'd like to invite you to produce a higher level of discourse.

...you can't be serious. This is an incredibly over the top reaction to a very mild reply. Not to mention that telling me you're disappointed in me and inviting me to "produce a higher level of discourse" is far more arrogant and patronising than anything in my original statement.

But anyway, this is very obviously off-topic. I don't think it serves the wider community to continue this conversation so I'll leave it here.

Well, I'm certainly guilty of the same offense!

There's a company in my building that outfitted their team with $30K+ HP Z series workstations with 256GB of RAM... to run Microsoft Excel 2016.

That's more RAM than my cellphone has, but less disk than my laptop. It's getting close to being “big data.”

Right, if it's only millions of records, why can't Google sheets accommodate it.

DHTML involves trading 99.9% or so of your computational power for greater convenience of programming.

That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.

That's because you don't know how to use Excel (this isn't a knock on you, no one ever tells people how to use Excel). Excel sheets have a hard row limit of around a million rows, but long before you approach that you will have moved your data into the "Data Model", which is a relational table engine stapled on to Excel, or to some other backend which you will query from Excel (often via the Data Model).

Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.

Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.

Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains en_US syntax), but this difference is even in the format of CSV files processed by excel (there is significant portion of the world, where the C in CSV stands for semiColon, as far as excel is concerned)

I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.

Wait, really? As in '=somme(A1:A10)' to add a column?

Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.

People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.

The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing. We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever. So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language.

That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English.

Well there isn’t any better spreadsheet software in 2019. Like what even comes close in terms of features and fit?

Photoshop. I think it’s a tiny little more mixed opinion of the overall program in terms of UX, but again, the closest replacement might be Affinity. And that is too new.