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Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it's a "cognitive amplifier," claims Satya Nadella.

in other words please help us, use our AI

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[–] 25 points 7 months ago (8 children)

I did and it's awesome. People like to shit on Excel, but there is a reason why every business on earth runs on Excel. It's a great tool and if you really learn it, you can do great things with it.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

    It's just a generic table / matrix thing mostly. Turns out tables are a good way to lay out a bunch of different information.

    Somehow nobody has made a similar generic application to allow you to work with nested list, outline, or tree style structures, which I think are equally if not more useful structures to lay out certain types of information.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Tables isn't what make Excel or it's alternatives excel at tasks. If that's all it were, it'd be easily replaced. The formulas and all the other features that help you format, arrange and represent that data is what really makes it good.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    It's not 100% of it, but it's a large portion.

    Excel isn't replaced because your company already bought it. There are many alternatives to Excel and most of them are acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people who use Excel (people using it for tables and basic graphs) and none of them have displaced Excel.

    I mean look at Word. It absolutely sucks and yet it's standard anyway. Same with Outlook.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Hence why I mentioned Excel or it's alternatives. I was responding to you referring to spreadsheet software as a simple table/matrix.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I wasn't saying that's all it is. I was and am saying that that's why and how a large portion of people use it.

    There is a lot of usefulness in simple data structures with a GUI over top. That's why the data structures were invented in the first place. People--especially in software product management--are insistent that the complicated features are what keep people using software, even when it's obviously untrue.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Just to give you two examples of stuff I used today:

    Excel has PowerQuery, which is a really fancy and nice way of importing data into your spreadsheet. You can import data from another spreadsheet, from an CSV, a database or from websites and update them with one click. You can also transform that data during import. So if you want to just use two columns of that spreadsheet from accounting, you can import them in the format you need. And if accounting updates their spreadsheet, you can update yours with one click. LibreOffice doesn't have this as far as I know with that power.

    The other one is simply plugins for nearly every other business system in the world. I have this nice BI plugin which gives me a pivot table of our sales data. So if I want to know how my revenue was yesterday, I can update my spreadsheet with one click. I can also jack into our CRM and get f.e. visit data from our sales reps.

    So in this case I can take some data that is sitting somewhere on the company drive, import & transform it and then mash it up with sales data from BI and CRM. So building a quick report like "which accounts were created last year and have no sales and have no visit from sales reps" is quite easy. And if I want I can also set this up to create this with PowerQuery & Co so that I can do this report monthly/weekly without having to copy & paste data every time. That's not really possible with LibreOffice right now.

    There will be comments that this is not a job for Excel and that you should use Python/SQL queries/whatever for that task, but Excel is what most companies have. I could do it with Python, but it is not installed on my business computer and people are used to Excel and are not trained in Python. There is a reason why businesses are using Excel for everything and that is because it is easy, quick and gets shit done

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