[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