"I didn't install it, I only chose to use it for something it isnt suited for instead of looking for alternatives, not my fault"
It is however most suited to accounting and logistics tasks. For any more novel use case, you’re going to have to put some thought into how you use it, or use a more suitable alternative. Even for the tasks that it’s very well suited to, there will always be more sophisticated alternatives. But I’d consider the way it lowers the the technical barriers to entry an overwhelming positive, even if it doesn’t completely absolve the users from learning about how their data works. I have the same frustrations with developers who have been trained by ORMs to have no idea how RDBMSes work. But I consider it their fault for not learning their trade properly, rather than the fault of the people who make nice tools to help them.
But one specific use case for genetics means its totally unsuitable & and big problem with the product. Got it.
Excel documents almost always have issues, independent of genomics[0]. I can probably just skim through my emails and find a bunch of problem spreadsheets all over.
Fundamentally, the problem is threefold.
1) excel tries to be smart, and this works in the easy case and breaks down in the edge cases. The edge cases also tend to appear with larger data entry as various one-offs, so it’s particularly insidious
2. Excel is difficult to validate (formulas are hidden, naming things properly is a bit of a hack, no real typechecking, data constraints can be set but it’s hard to check what’s set to what across all cells, etc)
3. The typical user / target market isn’t trained to use what facilities excel does happen to offer.
Ultimately, the problem is that excel doesn’t “scale”, and by default you get the wrong thing.
And even if you know how to set things up properly, it’s near impossible to be sure it stays proper.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-er...
You KNOW the problem exists, yet you STILL choose to use the software, THEN expect it to change its behaviors because its inconvenient for your very specific use case. Microsoft aren't going to fix this behavior because there are likely millions if not billions of spreadsheets that rely on it.
That is not a software problem.