[taviso]

I'm happy that you like this syntax, but the claim you made was "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", not "excel syntax is more fucking beautiful".

I appreciate your advice, but I don't need to watch a video on R1C1 syntax, I literally maintain a spreadsheet :)

It seems like your real claim is that you really like the way Excel does it, nobody can argue with that.

[snthpy]

I have to agree with the OP (_dain_) here. Excel has evolved a lot in the last few years, first the whole Power Query and Power Pivot revolution and now all the functional stuff brought on by Simon Peyton-Jones and his crew like LET expressions and the functional constructs like LAMBDA, MAP, FILTER, ...

There's very little you can't do neatly and efficiently in Excel anymore. Yes you can in principle do those same things in Google Shets, but at what cost of readability?

I don't think it's worth spending much time getting into these arguments because the people arguing against Excel clearly don't know modern Excel very well.

[taviso]

> I don't think it's worth spending much time getting into these arguments because the people arguing against Excel clearly don't know modern Excel very well.

That's not it at all. Excel has been in active development for over 30 years by a multi-trillion dollar development powerhouse with billions of sales, everybody is aware it's a perfectly competent product.

The dispute is the objective claim that it can do something that alternatives cannot, not the subjective claim that Excel is "neater", or more beautiful, or more user friendly. After 30 years of active development I would hope that Excel has some shortcuts, polish and syntax improvements to streamline common operations. That is not the same as not being able to do something.

I question the claim that it can do something unique, and want to hear an example. When pushed for an example I'm told that only Excel has a Solver, or only Excel has Pivot Tables. That is objectively false.

I don't want to hear about "Power Query" unless it's an example query that cannot be done in SQL. It's a proprietary query language, of course alternatives don't have it. I'm glad you're happy about it, but others might call that "Vendor Lock-in".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in