Lets not pretend like there wouldn't be dozen of quality and actually used software if it wasn't for microsoft existing.

I actively prefer Libre Office.

Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.

For me,

- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)

and

- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items

makes it worth it.

Just change your windows display language to English?

Should I also change it on my mother's computer who doesn't speak English? We can also start distributing .bat files that change the system language along with our spreadsheets, for anyone who wants to open them. Maybe automate it with VBS, so it changes automatically when you open the spreadsheet. That's the solution.

The VBS should then also lock the spreadsheet to foreground while it's opened, because the global change may affect other apps, like Windows Calculator may swap the comma/thousand separator.

Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s

Work computer, so I might not be able to do it.

Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?

Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?

Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.

It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.

I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.

Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.

But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.

I'd need a pretty strong argument to believe the world would be better absent spreadsheet programs.

My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.

Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.

It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.

And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...

I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).

Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.

piracy in the school playground in the 90s did much to cement the use of MSFT Office at home

Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.

IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.

> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.

What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.

Now let's talk about MS Access!

Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.

If pleebs can understand it, surely it’s not as foul as you state.

Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.

Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?

I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.

What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.

Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.

It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

> It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."

And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.

Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.

Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).

Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.

With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.

I hate the localized function names quite a lot too. In german it even uses umlauts in some of them.

CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.

UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.

Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.

> And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.

I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]

Related

Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte

http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...

Microsoft are wielding the entire office suite as a weapon against free and interoperable formats…

It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.

If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.

Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.

Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.

I’ve never come across Google docs in the wild in a corporate setting.

Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.

Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.

It's all anecdotal, but I haven't seen Microsoft Office in my job since 2010. It's been wall-to-wall Google for the past four companies.

Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.

That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.

I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.

My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.

> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.

I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.

Thoughtworks was on GSuite when I was there.

Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.

It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.

FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.

I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.

My experience for smaller companies is more like:

- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top

- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs

That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.

Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.

OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.

This is not an interface problem but deliberate action to make office formats non-compatible with other software.

Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.

> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence

Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)

I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.

Americans don't use CSV?

Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.

To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.

I don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.

1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU

   1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
   1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"

See the problem now?

Your operating system cannot solve this problem.

Not all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.

I don't understand the down-votes, but okay, have it your way, lmao. Someone really hates dots.

I guess the downvotes are because you also didn't understand the context.

It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it

Yeah, I agree with that and I find it frustrating.

CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.

Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?

Is this 2025? Why would any software safe it invalid like that to begin with?

The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.

Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl

If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV

Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.

> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain.

Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.

If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.

But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.

> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.

It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.

this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?

No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.

Excel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.

For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?

Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.

For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.

Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.

> Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard.

Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

yeah, what Excel does is, it assumes the comma and separator of your regional settings and doesn't care if it fails or not.

> In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.

CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.

Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.

Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.

OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.

Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?

Excel and Minesweeper. I'm still so angry about what they did to Minesweeper.

Who invented the spreadsheet?

The victors truly get to write history, don't they?

I just wish the Mac version wasn’t so painful