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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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I do this for a living. I've spent basically my whole career (15 years full time professional at this stage) basically trying to kill excel. You can't, or at least I can't. You can add processes to it, you can programmatically read/write from it, but when it comes down to ditching it: every stakeholder is invested in excel. No other piece of office has the staying power that excel has, it will outlast us all
Because the tech-illiterate people who have authority only know "productivity" tools and couldn't care less about the opinions of the people who actually know what they're doing.
Those at the top are often more tech literate than I give them credit for. I suspect it is actually those armies of analysts that are holding it back
The Peter principle says otherwise, but analysts are a factor for sure.
I've witnessed the dilbert principle more
Yeah, I have access to database tools to do my job, but I don't know how to use those tools so I use Excel to do shit it really isn't optimized to do.
I am 100% part of the problem when I create a spreadsheet with formulas cross correlating data from 41000 entries, 9000 entries, and 1200 entries.
I disagree. It's way more that they aren't hiring the right people to do the job. I've been asked to do some analysis, but the only tool I know how to use is Excel so that's what I use to answer the mail. If I had access to a database person to help me build a better tool I'd be happy to not use Excel. But I don't so I do what I can to do my job.
So Excel=cockroach?
I suspect slightly more useful than a cockroach. Believe it or not, it's actually good at what it does. That's why it's still here. And also why I'm in a job, as there are plenty of things it shouldn't be doing too
It's surely a nightmare for long term usage but is there a software that can beat the functional reactive sort of auto updates when using spreadsheets with a few thousand rows of data? I'd have to actually use my brain to do the same thing as a pivot table in an array programming language.
Any sort of actual database will let you do it. SQL based the obvious answer, but they are all way harder to use than they should be. SQLite never got anything as good as excel sadly, and parquet still lacks a decent windows client. The WYSIWYG of excel really is so intuitive, nothing I know matches it