Also Microsoft makes tens of billions of dollars per year from Excel and even if only 1% of that goes back into performance, that’s a lot of optimization.
We are in a thread about rendering an image by zooming out enough on an excel spreadsheet and then manipulating it in near real-time by applying a formula on the cells.
It's pretty damn impressive! I get it's 'cool' to hate MS but seriously...
I'm not trying to be rude to you. I'll believe you that you worked there, worked on excel and maintain contact with people still htere and that people are "working on performance" and you can believe me that we just can't see the results of that work.
But yes, I'm a bit jaded. I think you'll understand why that is too. The vast fortune in revenue that doesn't fix bugs put me off excel in a big, big way. That was 2008 or so.
Here's Andrew Gelman in 2013 on the topic:
"Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its desirable features. The disaster that is Excel seems like more of a mystery."
We've heard from microsoft so many times they have people working on all those bugs too. I remember the sheer disappointment in testing the newly fixed rand() function after all the fanfare by filling a page with =rand(), conditionally formatting when negative to be red and seeing the page turn largely red after a couple of F9 re-calculates.
I simply don't believe that excel programmers are idiots and have been for 15 years.
That leaves "they say they're working on it but they are not, not really." At the top of my alternatives. Is there a better one you can suggest?
Enlighten me please, how does this epic cluster of fudge happen? You were probably there while it was ongoing.
Parts of excel work well, /all/ the stats should have been removed 15 years ago as unfit for purpose and zero will or ability or effectiveness in getting a fix and making good.
Excel, just don't. That is a pretty reasonable response, don't you think? Yeah it's sad. I don't relish it but let's not pretend it's all ok, yeah? But I guess the masses of revenue keep coming in so I guess it is all ok from microsoft's point of view. Are you ok with that yourself?
Um, there isn't an easy way to say this, so I'll just say it: calm down.
I'm an Excel and VBA guy. The IDE hasn't been updated since office 97. It's not great.
But the thing that Microsoft understands iS that people buy your software if it doesn't break their workflow. Backwards compatibility is the most compelling feature when you've got an install base in the millions.
Now, they have fucked up. A lot. There is a bug that counts 1900 as a leap year. The statistical functions don't work. They can't dump VBA no matter how much they want to. They tried with VSTO and officejs but nobody is buying. I get it. They are stuck and the only real way out is to break compatibility. But haven't we seen what happens when you go down that road. Python 3. Perl 6. Acrimony. Discord. And for what? Your spreadsheet to break and you have to debug it? What if you have a spreadsheet that's never been documented with a million formulas. You probably have a day job, you need your tools to work and Microsoft understands that.
This sounds a bit like Comic Book Guy. For every person who has the opinion that Excel is “so crappy” there are probably 100 like myself who place it in the highest category of application software quality, with applications like Gmail and Adobe After Effects. You can prepare a list of weaknesses of any of these, the same way you could write about all of the mistakes that Michael Jordan made in basketball games.