Excel may have failed in this specific task, but let’s not pretend like its functionality doesn’t run circles around Google Docs and LibreOffice.

Excel is a “pretty darn good” tool for 95% of tasks. If your work has highly varied workflows, then that flexibility more than makes up for its failures on the last 5%.

If you have very specific workflows on the other hand, you may find value in replacing Excel with a specialist tool. But let’s not pretend that specialist tools don’t also have their own shortcomings; at best they’ll achieve 99.9% coverage of tasks.

From my point of view Excel hits a sweet spot between 'very simple tasks' and 'very complex tasks'.

The sweet spot being "too complicated for simple tasks" and "not sophisticated enough for complex tasks"?

>"too complicated for simple tasks"

How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks? It is pretty much as straightforward as it goes when it comes to grid-file viewing and editing. You can show it to anyone from a high-schooler to a 60 year old (with minimal experience on computers) colleagues and they will figure it out rather easily, good luck teaching Python/Pandas to the latter.

>"not sophisticated enough for complex tasks"

Not sure how that works either really. Between formulas and VBA macros, people have and are making tools complex enough they have no business to be an Excel, and yet they are even if it isn't the best tool for it. Once you go past that point, Excel isn't even in the conversation nor does it pretend to be able to.

It has issues, and people playing or working with complex (or simple) data would be better served to learn programmatical tools, but until they do Excel will serve them well as long as they stay wary of basic quirks.

> How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks?

Excel is too complicated to send an e-mail for example. You can send e-mail from excel but it's much simpler to do in Outlook.

Excel is too complicated for simple math = if you want to do 1024*436 it is better to fire up a calculator rather than wait for excel to start up.

That's irrelevant tho, Excel isn't meant to be Outlook so why should it also be able to send email straightforwardly? The fact you're even able to send one thru VBA to me shows it is not "too simple for complex tasks", albeit probably ill-suited in this case (and many more, but that's besides the point).

And while the calculator might be marginally faster if you exclude start-time, Excel is still perfectly fine for your use-case it only requires to type one extra symbol than the calculator, namely "=1024*436[ENTER]". Hell, it's probably faster to do it in Excel if you already have an active window. I don't see how it could possibly fulfill the task in a simpler manner.

Is R a bad statistical tool because I can't use it as Photoshop?

> if you want to do 1024*436 it is better to fire up a calculator

You lose your history this way, while you can easily keep it in Excel.

You could presumably come up with similar arguments for why Word (or equivalents) isn't "too complicated for simple tasks" and "not sophisticated enough for complex tasks", but, from experience, I'd argue that's also incorrect.

To be fair, I wasn't arguing in bad faith and I would've welcomed arguments (should you care enough to participate) to tell me why you are right. Instead you throw Word into the mix, for which those theories (perhaps ill-phrased, but I wouldn't call them arguments) can indeed be just as easily dismissed.

I think the arguments are stronger against Word than they are for Excel, but they're similar.

If you want to run some simple calculations on numbers, Excel is vastly overpowered and baroque. New version? Hope you've learned the new magic series of GUI clicks. Just like Word, Excel files are not inspectable (again, more baroque 'magic').

I can easily run calculations on plain texts tables in Emacs (along with the normal conveniences of being able to reorder by row, column; apply formulae across a range of cells etc.). And that's all displayed in plain text. And I can easily add new functions, keybindings, whatever, to suit my needs.

But the fact that you say the arguments against Word "can indeed be just as easily dismissed" makes it unlikely that this is likely to be a productive dialogue.

For Word, it's way more complicated than most people need, and again, users are at the (non-existing) mercy of the application. It's not very user-configurable - you have to learn how Word expects you to do things. Again, its data files are non-inspectable monstrosities, with minor corruption causing complete corruption, and fragility between versions.

I manipulate text for a living. For simpler things, it's much easier and productive to use something like Markdown or (for more complex things) something like Org-mode. For complex things, I need LaTeX - Word simply lacks necessary functionality.

Well, I will see myself out as this is indeed an unproductive conversation, it feels like I am speaking to a Linux zealot about why my grandmother has no need for Arch. But just to answer a last time, inspecting files is in no way something the average MS Office user has any need to do, it has nothing to do with the conversation really.

So, Excel is to complex for simple calculation, but you expect my mother and nearly retired colleagues who never used non-GUI apps to learn emacs to add two columns together? Is this a joke? Besides, the fact you can do it so much easier with emacs, regardless of the veracity, is fallacious at best and says nothing of Excel.

Yeah, you need to learn how the program works, that's how programs always work. Are you telling me you didn't need to learn how emacs and Latex work when you first tried it? I for one have never met someone who didn't learn how to use Word, it's pretty damn easy.

>I manipulate text for a living

Here, we find the problem. You are a specialist and you seemingly lost touch with the way average people use Excel and Word. The only argument I see in these two comments is that Excel and Word are not suited for specialist needs, which is probably true, but I don't see a hint of why they are not suited for basic operations or their intended use cases. So I will see myself out, thanks.

LibreOffice AND Google Docs fall in the same exact spot than Excel here. Try it. Type "SEPT-2" or "SEPT2" in any of them and see what happens.

LibreOffice Calc: "SEPT-2" is a date, "SEPT2" is not.

Do they change the data or only the representation? Several people here argued that LibreOffice preserved the original data, which would be a pretty fundamental difference in this context.

SEPT-2 is changed to date (that is how all major spreadsheet software works if an input is accepted as date), SEPT2 is kept as text as entered.

And actually it depends on the locale you work in whether SEPT is a valid month abbreviation or not.

Some biologist will write a gene as Sept-2. Its best to change the name so that its not a date.

Characterizing this as a "fight between Microsoft and the entire genetics community" is... a choice. But I guess Tech is this season's "big bad", so every subplot has to tie back.

Better tools for managing genomic information are probably out there, but if everyone picks Excel (or workalikes that all do automatic date formating too), then hoping people switch is tilting at windmills.

Unilaterally declaring you will not use names that confuse Excel will fix the problem (until we get new month names, anyway), and not require anyone outside their sphere of influence to comply.

I had the same situation at work, as an aquired company we had servers named devX, the new parent had servers named devX and pushed ssh config files to our laptops that made it impossible to connect to our servers; we asked them to fix it the first couple times, but eventually renamed our servers to vedX to avoid the issue. It wasn't the right solution, but it was a stable solution and let us get on with our lives instead of fighting with IT.

The vast majority of people who use tabular data a lot in biology are already just using python or R primarily, and most do this work on a cluster. This article is what happens when you send your .csv to a PI who hasn't bothered to brush up on any computer literacy after somehow mastering punch card programming, or the undergrad whose breadth of understanding beyond the web browser starts with MS office and ends with g suite.

But they did pick a better tool: they changed the name. Nomenclature is also technology.