I had a Manager that spent an entire week compiling a report on how much times people spent on tasks.
He was very proud as he was showing me this report.
I asked him why he didn’t use a pivot table.
While he was asking what that was, I spent two minutes on the same data that he had and reproduced his report.
I had a friend and patron for life after that. I was involved in many major decisions for a fortune 50. All because I could work excel.
Excel is pretty efficient at ad-hoc text processing. You get real time feedback as you change rules and there are lots of handy functions to help you along. Its like a tabbed portable jupyter notebook.
Love this analogy. Yes, Excel is error-prone at its core. It's also the most widely-used and accessible IDE yet created. Those statements are correlated.
python+pandas [1] is probably quite an easy choice for most common things people would use excel for. And being in the python ecosystem offers lots of libraries for statistics, machine learning, signal analysis, plotting etc.
People like real time feedback it's why word is more popular than tex, all these tech folks pushing code solutions to wysiwyg software issues are missing the point.
I use LibreOffice Calc for most of my work. It works just fine.
The question I have is not about using spreadsheets, but why Excel? It takes way too long to load and the UI gets worse with every iteration. Most people don’t even use 99% of the features in Excel (Find and Replace amazes some people). It is headed on the same trajectory as the abomination of diagramming software known as Visio.
And what are the alternative's silent pitfalls, areas of common misunderstanding et al? Replacing a tool because it is not used properly is just asking to receive another tool to be misused.
I had a Manager that spent an entire week compiling a report on how much times people spent on tasks.
He was very proud as he was showing me this report. I asked him why he didn’t use a pivot table.
While he was asking what that was, I spent two minutes on the same data that he had and reproduced his report. I had a friend and patron for life after that. I was involved in many major decisions for a fortune 50. All because I could work excel.