[crispyambulance]

    > Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things

Good luck with that, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Many "non-trivial" applications got their start at someone's desk in the form of a shitty excel spreadsheet with horrific macros. Is it optimal for "complex analysis"? No, but it doesn't matter because most things are computationally simple. The hard part is the intricate business logic and the timeliness of getting results and these things are not "trivial" at all.

Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should be providing alternatives. And no, engaging a software team/consultant for a million dollars to develop bespoke applications or interfaces to enterprise systems for every little project isn't a viable solution for people who need to get stuff done pronto.

A real alternative to Excel is no small feat.

[speleding]

I agree with that. Modern software development has version control, unit tests, package managers, etc. Ideally we get support for some of those concepts in something that feels like a spreadsheet to the end user. (I'm not sure if it could ever be retrofitted to Excel)

[will4274]

As others have said, you can get version control with Excel by saving the file the SharePoint.

Some huge financial spreadsheets have sanity checks computations. With conditional coloring (turn this cell red if the sanity check fails) these can feel a lot like unit tests. However, these are mostly for business logic - so it's hard to see how a vendor could provide them.

In other words, it's not that excel doesn't have version control and unit tests - it's that the people who wrote excel spreadsheet sheets don't understand version control or unit tests.

[adekok]

> Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should be providing alternatives.

Yeah... like I'm going to compete with MS by writing my own Excel replacement. That just isn't realistic.

What would be realistic is for MS to acknowledge that a large proportion of their customers use Excel for a particular purpose. And then tailor their software to the needs of their customer base.

But why would MS care? The researchers already bought Excel. So why "fix" it?

On top of that, no one is aware the the published papers are crap.

The real solution would be for journals to deny publication of papers based on shitty Excel analysis.