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A comment on Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out Microsoft. Parent comment

Re:Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out M... by esafak on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @03:03PM (#44240199)
Excel is for playing with data that is already aggregated. You don't see any data scientist in a tech company reaching for spreadsheets. Business analysts use them, maybe, because they work with the raw data rolled up by the engineers.

How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it.

edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.

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Re:Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out M... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @03:26PM (#44240453)
Yes, yes, Excel is the Blub tool. Plenty of other options which are better typed, performant, intuitive, whatever.

Every F500 company has accountants, FPNA, auditors, likely even the CFO who are doing their analysis in Excel. They live and breathe it. It is their everything app which they run 40 hours a week. They know Excel, they are the 10x rockstars of their field.

It is a common refrain here that you should absolutely invest in SAAS tools at $/month if it makes your workers more productive. Even if they are not slinging code, these people already have the best tool for their job. Making them all switch to save a few bucks to a less feature complete option is hamstringing yourself.

Could many people switch without issue? Sure, but it is foolhardy to imagine a 100% cut over without enormous pain to the elite staff.

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Re:Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out M... by Delphiza on Wednesday June 11, 2025 @04:49AM (#44245539)
Good points. It is egregious that HN 'technologists' will tell people that the tool that they use for 40+ hours a week to _get stuff done_ is completely wrong and that they must use python and a text editor instead.
[ Parent | on HN ]