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by AzuraJergen 2324 days ago
Excel, SharePoint and Email all have one thing in common. They are almost universally used and have a low barrier to entry.
3 comments

Exactly, no IT department to navigate, no Target operating models, no deployment processes.

Creating better tools is not the answer, reducing the operation burden of deploying said tools is.

Excel alone is probably responsible for the largest productivity gains of the entire information age. It is the most used programming environment on the planet.
Ok, but why not use Google Sheets or Airtable instead of Excel?
Office Online has all the same features and is far less likely to disappear one day. Personally, I don't use MS Office, but for business, or any other morphing collection of people, MS Office feels like the safe choice.
Privacy concerns. Why would you upload private information to a third party for no advantage?
There are some advantages like version control or everyone working in the same document with the latest data.

I've seen it dozens of times. Someone shares the wrong excel file then others keep working with outdated data. Or maybe they all share a file in Dropbox but someone didn't sync for some reason and kept working and generating changes over an old file.

Because excel is much better once you need advanced features.
You think the majority of Excel users use advanced features?
Yes, at least indirectly.

The majority of people using Excel in a business environment at least sometimes use those functions, even if most don't actually understand them.

There is just about always someone in the office/department who "knows excel" well enough to use the Macro Recorder and occasionally tweak something in the code, and that's enough. So they get the task of automating the thing in the spreadsheet and then everyone else uses it.

Yes they do. Maybe not the majority of users but enough to be important. There are a lot of very smart and math savvy people who don’t know how to program but do very complex stuff in excel.