[IANAD]

First, I learned a lot from this. But, here's some light criticism:

1. Joel saying "I didn't understand that question" and then moving on might have been succinct and practical, but it was just not a good reflection of him.

2. He acts like R1C1 mode is the only way handle relative references for the first 13 minutes. One of the first things I learned in Excel was $ to pin a reference to row or column in what he calls "baby mode". I think it's not babyish to use $ which is more succinct; you can edit the formula and see the calculated value right away. It seemed like he waited a long time to talk about that.

3. "Almost none of which you can do in Google spreadsheets" at 18:15. Sounds so pro-Microsoft, right? Yet, if you look, he's obviously using OS X, which is surprising to me, because MS Office has historically sucked on OS X compared to its Windows counterpart, and it's been incomplete: https://9to5mac.com/2016/01/21/windows-mac-ipad-microsoft-of... even though, yes, it's a lot better than it used to be. Also, Google docs is free.

[craigmccaskill]

He's presenting this to his company. I don't think this video was originally intended for mass consumption, but I am glad it was made available.

So this is the CEO presenting to a group of people who know him and his presentation style, I think at that point much of the stuff you're complaining about can be thought of as humor or house style, especially when you consider that Joel worked at Microsoft on Excel. Context matters.

[gbrayut]

As someone who watched the live stream of the original presentation from the Stack Overflow lunchroom I can confirm that the video is missing some context. Definitely a bit of house style and a throw back to some old school memes, but overall an informative and humorous training session that I am glad was made public.

Joel usually gives great presentations, and recently he even started personally editing our internal company update videos (and complaining when we don't show appreciation by up voting them :-) because the first one was a bit dry.

[ageektrapped]

> 1. Joel saying "I didn't understand that question" and then moving on might have been succinct and practical, but it was just not a good reflection of him.

He's presenting in the style of You Suck at Photoshop, a series of Photoshop videos in the same style.

[ythl]

> He's presenting in the style of You Suck at Photoshop, a series of Photoshop videos in the same style.

In fact, I think he directly quotes YSAP at 25:34

https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=1534

I'd have to find the right YSAP episode, but I'm 90%+ sure that Donnie says something extremely similar.

[0xcde4c3db]

At the beginning he says something like "this is basic to intermediate, but for you this is going to be stupid hard", which is from the first (?) YSAP, "Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M

[jevinskie]

Reading your single comment (and watching the linked clip) was very much worth my time! I never before realized that you can address Excel cells via a symbolic name instead of row/column-wise. That is very cool and probably very basic. Now I'm going to watch the rest of Joel's video!

[jaydles]

Regarding point 1, blowing off that question was an inside joke. I get why it comes off as dismissive and rude without context - it was originally an internal presentation - but the asker was Michael Pryor. He's Joel's co-founder at FogCreek and the CEO of Trello. It was playful banter between very senior peers.

[nhebb]

As mentioned elsewhere, he was a Program Manager for Excel. His story ("My First BillG Review") about spearheading the effort to bring VBA into Excel is a great read:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

[SteveCr48]

Thanks for sharing the link. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his blog. Thanks again!!

[harryh]

4. All the stuff he starts describing at 18:40 Google Sheets will actually do just fine except the Growth Trend bit on the heights.

5. 33:25 - Nope, that works in Google Sheets too. Just like Excel.

6. OK that table shit was cool though. Sheets can't do that.

[r00fus]

This video is a year old; Google sheets has notably improved in that time.

[harryh]

I'm fairly confident that points #4 and #5 both worked a year ago. I guess I can't be 100% sure, but I'm preeeeety sure.

[spydum]

tables is one of my most sorely missed features from excel. I'm really surprised it's still lacking in sheets

[viraptor]

It's missing everywhere. Sheets, libreoffice, office for Mac, anything... Ok, office for Mac does have tables, but I keep running into issues when referencing them - some values just end up as error until you change the source (even to the same value)

[shostack]

Google Sheets is still painful in many areas. Cell/chart/pivot formatting is a big one.then there are little things like the pivot table interface. Sheets has come a long way but when I need to be efficient and effective, I roll up my sleeves and dive into Excel.

[blahi]

I remember watching this video a while ago and it is super basic. I can assure you that there are great many things that google sheet lacks.

[harryh]

Ya I know. Was just pointing out that Google Sheets isn't quite as basic as people think.

It really should be better though. I wish Google would commit to it more.

[cm2187]

Does it have array formulas now?

[cdolan92]

Agreed on the R1C1 mode. Its very helpful to explain "this is what is actually going on behind the curtain", which is likely why he stresses it so much when speaking with developers. However, its really unnecessary in the 'real world'.

[JBiserkov]

>Also, Google docs is free.

And so is Office Online. Always has been, six years now.

http://office.microsoft.com/online/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Online

[savanaly]

I am curious about the reason for the repeated potshots at Google Sheets. The way he talks about it he's playing the taunts for laughs, but usually there's an interesting story or grain of truth behind something like that.

I do notice the big google watermark in the top left of the video so at first I thought maybe he was doing this presentation for some google engineers and playfully poking fun, but the description says this is a presentation he gave for the benefit of his companies Fog Creek and Trello. So I don't know.

[jthomas0717]

Joel worked for Microsoft on the Excel team so it's probably a combination of professional pride and playfulness.

[gk1]

The Google watermark is there because this was recorded using Hangouts on Air.

[Pica_soO]

You know, how google walked into the whole GIS and Geography business and clicked its heels together once - closing the shop. I guess the very same thing is going on here- wounded pride. We fought and worked to make this happen- you can not give it away for free.

[jeremy_wiebe]

Is that really true though? As far as I know ESRI is still alive and doing quite well.

[roel_v]

I think the gp means that Google came in gis, looked around and decided 'nope, nothing for us here', and left? I mean, there's google maps, but that's it - while widely used, not exactly special.

[bitwize]

Google Sheets isn't running large chunks of the world economy yet. Maybe he'll stop mocking it when it is.

[nness]

Office for Mac was certainly a third-class citizen for a long time. Thankfully its improved quite a lot Office 2016 for Mac, and they are somewhat comparable now. That is until you have a MSSQL connection in your Excel sheet... it was surprising to find people that do that.

[magnetix]

I am still waiting for tables in Outlook 2016 to be returned.

[seanc]

The big win in Google spreadsheets is that functions are nearly universally composable. Unlike Excel.

[sedatk]

What does that mean?

[seanc]

In google spreadsheets I can do something like:

=count(filter(a1:z30>0))

where in Excel I'd have to make an extra column to store the result of the filter, and then count those.

[greggyb]

You can use array formulas to achieve the same result in Excel.

[throwaway287391]

Re 3: he does say (at some point in the latter half of the video, after the OS X beach ball spins for several seconds when he tries to do something very simple) that Excel for OS X is a lot less stable than for Windows.

[hasenj]

I think he's wrong on the R1C1 mode. At least in the latest version of excel on mac, you can observe this behavior:

1) In cell A, reference cell B

2) Cut (not copy) cell C and paste it over cell B

3) Observe cell A throwing a #REF! error

To be concrete, type 10 in cell A1, then type `=A1` into cell A2. A2 now shows 10. Now click cell B1, cmd-x to cut, then move the cursor to A1, cmd-v to paste. Now cell A1 is empty and cell A2 shows #REF!

This will not change if you use the R1C1 mode.

So internally it's neither R1C1 nor is it A1. Internally it's a reference to the cell object directly.

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

I just tried this. In "baby mode" it does what you say. In R1C1 mode, A2 becomes 0 when the blank cell B1 is cut/pasted to A1. So in my experience (Windows 10, Excel 2016), R1C1 references the cell, not the object, whereas baby mode references the object.

[rimantas]

Wasn't historically MS Office first to appear on Macs?

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Yes. Word and Excel were ported to Mac OS before Windows even existed to be ported to, and PowerPoint was a Mac-exclusive product created by another company.