You’re entitled to your opinion but I would say Excel is one of the best, if not THE best spreadsheet application ever produced. It’s one thing that Microsoft actually got mostly right and one of the only reasons I still pay for an Office 365 subscription.
If you’re just creating simple spreadsheets, there’s plenty of other options out there.
But, if you’re a power user doing a lot of complex data analytics, Excel is still the king.
My main gripe is that I still have to use VBA for a lot of stuff behind the scenes. Yuck.
But, if you’re a power user doing a lot of complex data analytics, Excel is still the king.
Only if you refuse to learn SQL and do everything in a fraction of the time with way more functionality.
That works when you have access to a SQL database instead of a bunch of massive CSV files.
cracks knuckles
import pandas as pdImporting CSV into SQL is trivial and gives you far more control than Excel can.
Spreadsheets generally are a useful tool, no matter if it’s Excel, LibreOffice, or Google Sheets. There’s a sweet spot where the data isn’t so complicated that it justifies a full database and programming language.
There is a point, though, where you need to admit the dataset and your manipulations of it have gotten too big. If you were wondering who was excited about the Excel row limit going from 16k to 1M back in 2010, the answer is professors of Economics. This should tell you a lot.
This thread surprises me. Excel is fine, but I’ve seen people do so many silly things with it that it makes me dread having to use it. It’s like they treat every cell as its own special little canvas… Oh, you wanna randomly change the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd-Mmm-yy mid-column? With Excel, anything is possible.
Maybe I just don’t work well with others.
Excel is okay as long as it stays in its lane.
It is not okay if you’ve ever worked in a printshop or do graphic design and people send in newsletters or brochures or some shit done within Excel.
Excel is many things; it is not fit to layout documents. Blegh.
To be fair word isn’t good at it either.
I’ve found setting a PowerPoint slide to standard paper size is the best for quick page layout and “graphic design” for things like a poster or sign.
Word being a word processor also sucks at document layout. Most software that isn’t made for laying out documents suck at it, but people all try. My god do they try…
What software is good for document layout anyway? Something with PDFs?
Adobe sucks but InDesign is still pretty much the standard; it begrudgingly does a pretty good job.
Affinity Publisher is coming along nicely though. And yeah Scribus is not too bad either.
There’s so-called desktop publishing software.
In the open-source world, I typically see Scribus recommended.
I’m probably dead wrong somehow, but I don’t see why these aren’t the standard text document software. Is there some part of just a solid wall of text that can’t be done with DPS? Is the limitations of word processors somehow good for office use to the exclusion of slightly interesting formatting?
Yeah, I find the similarity most striking with LibreOffice Draw vs. LibreOffice Writer. It very much feels like Draw is just a superset of the features of Writer.
There is certainly some differences, though, e.g. text doesn’t automatically overflow onto new pages, text boxes don’t automatically increase in size, things like that.
Everything is a lot more static, which is great for layout, and less great, if you just need to type out some text.Automatic formatting. Try to have an automatic table of content with and automatic index of tables in draw, it’s not available. When I write a lab report, I don’t want to check every page to make sure the title 3 is still on page 4.
Formatting software are good at manual formatting. Word processors are good at convenience. Once you know your way around, you can be fairly good at formatting with them, and you get the advantages of having some automatic features.
Excel can be it’s own kind of awful, but using it with other people makes me want to jump off a bridge onto a rusty bed of nails. They move cells around, change the labels on columns, color cells with no benefit, change half a sheet to comic sans, they fucking send you back “bullshit-v1.0-good.xlsx” then ”garbage name v0.3_gooder.csv”. Jesus fuck. The shitty thing has built in version control you ignorant fuck!
ohhh nonono You hate it because you either don’t know how to use/don’t use it enough, or you just don’t like your job. Excel is amazing, I could cry talking about it hahaha I had to work with google sheets once and almost had a heart attack, if I had no excel my job would be unberable
I’d agree with this. When I first started using Excel in school and university, I’d follow the instructions and not really know why I was doing what I was doing.
But then, having to work with Excel at work and make it do new shit, the penny dropped in my head and I understood how spreadsheets worked.
I use spreadsheets for heaps of things now, even if I don’t need to use formulas. Excel has some weird idiosyncrasies but it’s a good product overall. It’s not as bad as Word, which most people use incorrectly.
How can one possibly use Word incorrectly?
