Unpopular opinion: what turned Microsoft into what it is today was not Windows at all. It was Office, and specifically Excel.<p>It is the best of breed on the category by far.<p>But yes, only used by those who can't code.
From a sloppy reading of the headline I first thought this was some way of making Excel (optionally) typed, sort of like moving from JavaScript to TypeScript.<p>I wonder if this could work? It's an interesting idea, I think. I'm sure there have been attempts in the past...<p>I guess you would be able to assign both normal units and compound units to cells (like m and m/s^2) as "formatting" and do type checking when editing a cell that references other cells.
Might be unpopular opinion: Excel is best with no frills and just does what it does best- simple, quick and stable.
Power BI can continue to have whatever enhancements MS wants to push.
I see alot of business use excel as a way to not engage with IT teams since they can get very far without building true systems for the their needs. So I am not sure if this is a feature that will lead to further entrenching of excel into non-enterprise applications or will enable teams to more easily disconnect from excel as the tool to do all things. I guess time will tell.
Periodically I find myself needing to play with some data in a lot of different ways and potentially share that data in a professional context where appearance matters. It is during those periods I start looking up all of the excel functions and features.<p>However, if I am only occasionally looking at data and/or repeating the same operations than code + csv (or database) makes a lot more sense and gives me flexibility to deal with edge cases. I still end up opening it in excel but mostly because I already have it installed.<p>To be honest, I would sort of like a more primitive fast csv data viewer for times when I am feeling rusty on excel and bullish on small scripts. When you are doing the data manipulation elsewhere excel is overkill.<p>But every now and then it is a lifesaver
Wow, this totally blows up the scene. I'm sure there are gonna be haters, but Ballmercon 2021 is gonna be lit AF.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI</a>