Aren’t there actually lots of good features Microsoft added in say the last 19 years (office 2003 having, for this argument, a perfectly capable Excel with all the features)? Off the top of my head:
- Ribbon and context-aware toolbox made it easier for infrequent or novice users.
- good default styles for tables, which is what lots of people actually use Excel for
- Better support for actual tables (ie defined extendable ranges of cells)
- OFFSET/MATCH instead of VLOOKUP (maybe this was a culture change. Not sure when OFFSET or MATCH were introduced)
- improvements to default graph appearance (though I still dislike them for just showing the data)
- Lambda functions
- Relational models for data
- bigger spreadsheets
- flash fill(?) which is a magical programming by example thing
- fancy conditional formatting with colour changing smoothly with values
- possibly faster evaluation. I don’t know if it was actually improved
- maybe someday: collaborative editing
I’d like to point out that some improvements were made for power users and others for more ordinary users.
But did they have to make it worse for nonnovice users by removing the old menus and toolbars?
> - good default styles for tables, which is what lots of people actually use Excel for
An Excel sheet is already in and of itself a table.
> - Relational models for data
Yeah, thanks, we already have RDBMSes for that. Turning Excel into an RDBMS (or an RDBMS into Excel) only gives you a jackalope: Worthless both as a jackrabbit and as an antelope.
> - flash fill(?) which is a magical programming by example thing
You mean that thing that resolutely refuses to be useful whenever I try to get some "magic" from it?
> I’d like to point out that some improvements were made for power users and others for more ordinary users.
More like against power users in many cases, I'd say. (See the first point.)
Or at least they exist just fine in Spread32 which is a nice tiny spreadsheet tool that was first released in 1999 and born with Excel 4.0 compatibility target.
I believe it is more the "culture change" you mention, the "new" function is Xlookup, introduced recently:
https://www.powerusersoftwares.com/post/xlookup-just-killed-...
The option to not guess the format of input data as calendar dates comes to mind.
Excel is a product so complex I doubt it will ever run out of things to improve.
Yeah, sure, but why do they all have to be for the worse?
(Probably because it was already as good as it could get in that respect too. And then what do you do?)
Yeah, I think the issue is that once you've finished designing an interface or your software is feature complete, the company is faced with a problem: You don't have any actual work, but you absolutely need to maintain your expertise and sales.
What features can you really add to Excel at this point? What do you do when your market analysis says your application and interface are about the best they can possibly be? What do you do with your engineers when your product is, by nearly all measures, complete?
This is the problem that Google search has. And Microsoft's Windows and Office teams. We had basically everything on lock for quite awhile. Changes now are seldom improvements. They're just changes to justify the engineers' salaries that the company has to keep paying because maintaining that is a core competency. Moving all of them to a new project spoils your expertise in your own product so you can't just do that.
At this point, UX design for these products should probably shift to aesthetics, much like the auto industry did. And that's largely exactly what Windows has been since Windows 7. Aesthetic changes.