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.
As a CPA I can attest Excel is really useful for financial data analysis and problem solving. It takes time to learn, and there are limitations to manage, but when you know what you’re doing it really gets out of your way so you can focus your attention on the work product instead of the tool.
On how I got efficient, when I started my career I tried to optimize any task I had to perform repetitively, and after 3 years everything was pretty fast. After that I tried to optimize one process every month, and now I have a pool of ideas to pull from when problem solving.
As an engineer I can attest that it is also useful for quick calculations and illustrations, especially at the concept stage. We also ran process "simulations" in it for fun, but of course something like SciLab would be better suited for it. The possibility to simultaneously work in the same spreadsheet was also a godsend during lock-downs.
But there's libreoffice calc tho
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!
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?
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.
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.
Add one small image to word and the whole page goes nuts:
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*Cries in vector
This whole thread could have been an access database
God is Excel good, and I feel like I've barely touched the VBA part making buttons for my colleagues to get to certain parts of the Excel instantly. It runs well, and gets so much information out in a unique way, Speinkled with functions that run well . And it runs quite fast for something that can do so much
I'd say it's the task you do on it you dislike, not the program
Nah, I dislike all the other people using Excel. I once saw it used for providing a deployment configuration, which then got parsed from that Excel and pushed into a repo. Like, goddamn, just let me edit the repo directly.
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.
The best way I've heard it explained is that excel is too good at doing too many, but it isn't the correct tool for many of those things. Since it's good and accessible, people make it work and then you get this jumbled mess of stuff after time passes.
It doesn't help that Excel tries to be "smart"
Oh, putting in a lot#? Let's make that a date.
Most people don't set up an excel for what they want, they start using excel with what they have
I thought I hated excel, but then I tried Google sheets. Somehow it's even worse.
How? I live off of GS!
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?
People using carriage returns as paragraph breaks 😭😭😭