[t-c-h]

Excel is great, and generally really useful. But not so much in microbiology. Sure, if you have several dozen genes/proteins with some quantitative values and some conditional formatting to visually distinct certain properties, it's fine.

But in microbiology you usually works with very large datasets that undergo a lot of calculations through a lengthy pipeline. Larger sets and more intense ML approaches even need HPC's. Inserting Excel into this pipeline would be catastrophic.

[ethanbond]

Oh yeah, I'm totally aware. My day job is designing and building software to construct/maintain exactly those pipelines.

What I'm saying (which is not news to you) is that clearly Excel is excelling along some dimension that people really care about. Even if it is lacking along other dimensions, the goal ought to be figuring out what makes Excel so good, then figuring out how to reconcile that with the needs of e.g. a high scale genomics pipeline.

But to make even an inch of progress against that, we need to get rid of this "haha Excel is for plebes" attitude that many in the software community adopt.

[jpindar]

Excel excells at being already installed on most computers. That's it.

[ethanbond]

Huh.

Most computers also have a built in calculator app, but I have never heard of those being difficult to pull from the hands of users, even when replacing it with purpose built software that costs tens of millions of dollars per year.

But what do I know :)