There are a lot of things which are shitty about Excel but for the user it's a great program and how much better it is than Google Sheets is a great demonstration.

I think building a good spreadsheet program that is both accessible and powerful is very difficult. Excel might be the most non-trivially used "programming language" in the world.

It successful by same reasons as well known flavoured sugar water, child friendly high calories processed fast food chain and tabloids. They sold lies.

That is not true, Excel is a great platform for smart non-programming type people to do interesting stuff with numbers. I often find that instead of building a reporting function into some new system, just generating a spreadsheet generator that people can take and mess around with is better for them and less work for me. There's some issues that the stats people don't like, and like all compatibility-preserving 30 year old software, there are ugly bits, but it's got real value to it. I mean maybe use OpenOffice or Google docs or whatever instead if you find Oracle or Google better than Microsoft, but spread sheets are valuable to users.

I'm sorry, but that's absolute twaddle.

Excel is genuinely excellent. I was as big a MSFT-hater in the 90s as you are likely to be able to find, but credit where credit is due: Excel provides a level of data analysis power to a lay user that is just not available elsewhere.

Sure, tech people (cough HN readers cough) often want to trot out arguments about how "well, that sort of stuff just shouldn't be done in Excel! They should learn to use R or SQL or some other $MoreCorrectTool". That's poppycock. Excel is already on the analyst's desk. It's immensely powerful while ALSO being very accessible. Nothing else comes close.

No. And frankly, only people lying here were those who claimed open office spreadsheet is equal about a day it came out despite it being significantly worst.

Excel was just better by miles.