'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets.<p>Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don&#x27;t need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don&#x27;t need your IDEs. After all it&#x27;s perfectly possible to code in Notepad.<p>You also don&#x27;t need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good.<p>The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over &#x27;proper&#x27; software, databases etc is portability and auditability.<p>Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.

Excel is probably the most useful application ever made. Pretty much every professional services implementation and technical account management engagement is done via excel.<p>For me, I&#x27;ve used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It&#x27;s super easy at this point to see anything with it.<p>It&#x27;s well worth any price for sure. It&#x27;s really the only reason I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I&#x27;ve used more than 2% of it.

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because &quot;the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded&quot;. There&#x27;s like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don&#x27;t have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It&#x27;s a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.<p>Google Sheets is great, but I&#x27;m probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a <i>more</i> robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.

This is a very basic article compared to the conversation here.<p>Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis.<p>As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn&#x27;t trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%.<p>I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is.<p>Even things like how cells are frozen (if you&#x27;re on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.<p>So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn&#x27;t have it any other way.

I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better.<p>One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.<p>You will pry Excel from my cold dead hands.

Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story.<p>The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan.<p>In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise.<p>More recent times.<p>Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn&#x27;t envy him his task.<p>&quot;Please, not just Excel.&quot; I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data.<p>&quot;Rinse-and-repeat Excel&quot;. I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this.<p>And that&#x27;s it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I&#x27;m thankful that I haven&#x27;t had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.

This is one of the things LLM&#x27;s have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done.<p>I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spreadsheets explained in easy to understand terms for comparably non tech users a lot of stuff became easy to do. As llm had detailed usually correct answers and suggestions. I would have learned my way to doing it anyway but LLM&#x27;s brought the learning curve down from a few hours to a few min so was willing to just use libre office.

I don&#x27;t need 95% of excel&#x27;s features, and it does a lot of things that I don&#x27;t want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don&#x27;t want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files.<p>Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums&#x2F;means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I&#x27;ve been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it&#x27;s mostly very good (good enough that I don&#x27;t regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is <i>severely</i> lacking. But the main thing is that it&#x27;s not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.

Reading these comments, I think I might be a dinosaur, but Excel (native, Windows) has a really good keybindings UI (you press Alt, and all the key choices light up), and the ability to record actions as macros and then inspect the code is absolutely gold for automation. I know VBA is profoundly uncool and all that, but boy, if there was a better native IDE inside Excel with Copilot helping me along, I would be throwing money at Microsoft right now.

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators.<p>I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat&#x2F;lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set.<p>I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations.<p>A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing.<p>Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on&#x2F;off with color.<p>Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone.<p>I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.

I work adjacent to a mid sized engineering department that develops both hardware and software, for measurement equipment.<p>The managers use Excel, as one might expect, although at this point it might be equally accurate to say &quot;spreadsheets&quot; generically. I&#x27;m not sure how many of them use advanced features that are unique to Excel. They will use the one with the least friction. With that said, Excel probably still has the most finely tuned UI.<p>The traditional engineers use Excel. Very few of them program. The ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, have joined the software industry. The rest are pretty adamant that programming won&#x27;t get the job done quicker or more reliably than Excel.<p>The software engineers use Excel. They&#x27;re good at whatever their role is within the software team, but they use Excel for the same kinds of short-term or one-off problem solving that everybody else uses it for.<p>Do some spreadsheets get too big and unwieldy for their own good? Sure. But that would also be true if you let the managers and traditional engineers write their own code for solving the same kinds of problems. I know this because I write that kind of code. Nothing will ever bridge the gap between small and large projects, that exists in most mature organizations.

Based on this, I&#x27;d love to brainstorm here on HN about what a next-generation Excel could look like, one that keeps Excel’s core strengths without expanding into database like features found in tools like Airtable. Here are a few ideas:<p>1. Clear Separation between UI&#x2F;UX and Backend: By separating the user interface from backend processes—perhaps as a module or library—Excel could maintain its clean, familiar interface while supporting more complex calculations and data handling in the background. This concept is somewhat akin to “Microsoft Excel Services.”<p>2. Multi-Language Formula Support: Similar to how VSCode supports multiple programming languages, Excel could allow users to choose between languages for cell formulas. Many users are comfortable with the current formula syntax, but it feels outdated, and even Google Sheets has (obviously?) largely replicated this old model. Allowing for different languages, while keeping the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, could enable more advanced and flexible workflows.<p>3. Enhanced Data Types and Representations: Cells or groups of cells could support stronger data types, richer formatting, and custom representations, like embedded charts.<p>4. Integrated Data Connectivity: Excel could come with built-in tools to connect to external data sources and export data in structured formats, perhaps managed with an external orchestrator. I know you can do this with Excel and some other tools but I would like to just mark a cell and indicating that it can be consumed in a specific endpoint.<p>5. No artificial limits to the number of columns and rows.

I worked in finance professionally for 7 years before I started writing code for money, so I would say I am very familiar with the tool.<p>For the specific set of problems it is designed to solve, its like shooting the best sniper rifle ever made -- point, calibrate, pull trigger, win.<p>For any other problems outside of its scope, its like trying to break the world record for Nurburgring while driving a short bus.

I use Numbers for my day-to-day spreadsheet stuff, part of Apple&#x27;s iWork suite with Pages and Keynote.<p>The UI&#x2F;UX is so much better than Excel&#x27;s and you can export to .xlsx format.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong--there are some projects that require the functionality that Excel has. Using it gives me 90&#x27;s software PTSD but sometimes you have no choice.

An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She&#x27;s a programmer, so she could have used a wide range of tools but Excel was what she reached for and it evidently did the trick nicely.<p>The thing that stands out to me in these stories is that spreadsheet programs are a (1) the most common site of programmability that features in anyone&#x27;s lives, even non-programmer; and (2) for many tasks, spreadsheets sit at some kind of local optimum in a tradeoff between simplicity and power. (There&#x27;s surely something for engineers and designers to learn from the second point.)<p>It seems like a connection worth celebrating, between people like us and the mostly non-programming public— a little piece of overlap between two worlds.

The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe</a><p>Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!

I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too.<p>You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of &quot;programming&quot;.<p>However, due to whatever environment, desired or perceived skillsets (or limitations), other pressures, people stay and remain with that local tooling minimum for things that should have outgrown it. If you ever meet an office&#x27;s &quot;excel person&quot; you instantly understand this phenomena.

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.felienne.com&#x2F;public-appearances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.felienne.com&#x2F;public-appearances</a> and ctrl-f for Excel. Especially the videos, like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY</a> . Then have a gander at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;office&#x2F;lambda-function-bd212d27-1cd1-4321-a34a-ccbf254b8b67" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;office&#x2F;lambda-function-b...</a>

I’ve only ever used Libre(open) Office Calc since I’ve never paid for or bothered to pirate office before. What can Excel do that Calc can’t?<p>I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.

Right on time for the Excel World Championships... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=e4NP5FBB2G0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=e4NP5FBB2G0</a>

most people in tech don&#x27;t get what Excel is imo. start with the idea that it&#x27;s a fully featured virtual machine that uses a different interface metaphor than a command line or windowing. it&#x27;s useful to think of it as an abstraction layer where business runs, it&#x27;s where value is demonstrated. those user spreadsheets are computers&#x2F;hosts&#x2F;vms and I&#x27;d argue that&#x27;s often the disconnect between what technologists think they are supporting and what users think should be supported.<p>of course custom code is better at pretty much anything. I&#x27;ve been a unix user since the bsdi days and so to me spreadsheets are a cruel toy running in a blue tinted mental prison, but when you see excel as a different and sophisticated UX metaphor for a fully featured machine that the user uses for raw arithmetic computation, and as an alternative to a command line or a browser, it&#x27;s much easier to respect. that&#x27;s absolutely essential for understanding it and its users.<p>the thing about excel is if you don&#x27;t use it i guarantee you work for someone who does as the tabular metaphor is the system of the world. even if reality is more complex and needs more complex objects to model it, human beings ultimately organize around the contents of spreadsheets. hand wavy, but I don&#x27;t know how else to tell developers and product people they need to take excel seriously.

I grew out of it.<p>I started to really loath the spreadsheet data model. &quot;it&#x27;s a big bag of cells&quot; was not really doing anything for me. I started wanting better data structures and programing environments to work on that data.<p>For the data storage and basic calculations on that stored data role, I mainly use a relational database, most of what I wanted in a spreadsheet was row level security, that is, for my rows to stick together(one to many bad sorts I guess), and relational databases provided this in spades.

Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme).<p>I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, but missing another, allowing better testing, and type safety for data.

I wrote something to make it simple to embed C++ in Excel. It is useful for pushing business logic into platform independent code that can be integrated into back end production systems. One bonus is the original spreadsheet has unit tests vetted by the business users. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xlladdins&#x2F;xll">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xlladdins&#x2F;xll</a>

Because I’m so used to excel, I really have a hard time using sheets, it’s different enough to be annoying and easy enough to export to xls to open in excel and do things the way I want to.<p>One thing I’ve had success with lately is chat-gpt 4o to manipulate large sheets. Sometimes it is really dumb and ruins my data, so always keep the last iteration handy… Sometimes it does some really great things, especially comparing multiple excel files.

Fun facts, when Excel was launched by both Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft back in 1985 at Tavern on the Green, New York, Excel has 16,384 rows and 256 columns, and now original Excel&#x27;s rows now exactly matched the Excel&#x27;s current columns of 16,384 (2^14).<p>Another fun facts, on average people spent 10% of their working life using Excel.

It&#x27;s unfortunate that folks haven&#x27;t had the chance to try the various other alternatives --- Informix WingZ had quite nice charts, Lotus Improv was quite different, and only Quantrix has survived, but not many folks get to use it since its so expensive to license a seat. I wish the opensource Flexisheet would be reworked so that it would compile and run again.

There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.

The magic of Excel is that everyone has it and it does enough for most cases.<p>Yes, some things could be done better with a separate application or custom software, but that requires approval and contracts etc.<p>With Excel you can just build that crap yourself and share it or not.

It may well be on HN that I read so-and-so&#x27;s rule: It doesn&#x27;t matter what the users say they want, they want Excel.<p>Gratitude and an upvote to the person who can attach a name and citation to the rule.

40 years ago the spreadsheet was the killer app of the fledgling device known as the personal computer, and now it&#x27;s an indelible part of many people&#x27;s daily life.

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple&#x27;s Numbers app.

Yea, people grow up with rashes on their butts too, stop glorifying this steaming pile of s&#x2F;w doo doo...

Obligatory Krazam:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xubbVvKbUfY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xubbVvKbUfY</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ICp2-EUKQAI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ICp2-EUKQAI</a>

Excel is great but there’s a large audience who would benefit from something simpler and more intuitive. That’s what we are trying to build at Klaro (klaroapp.com)

This is unendurable, this article didn’t actually say what are the names of the babies! To describe entire process and then leave out the result is just bad journalism.