[tacroqueen]

No offense but you clearly are not a spreadsheet power user (and to be clear you're starting off with what feels like a pretentious reply/generalization: always turns out that the person stating that opinion is an Excel expert and barely looked at anything else.) I have never heard anyone that has used both products deeply ever admit that Numbers comes close to the capabilities of Excel (and this includes a few former Numbers devs). They really aren't even in the same product category. For basic spreadsheet stuff that 90% of people do, sure, and Numbers does have some UI niceties - but the differences go well beyond drag and drop behavior. It's way harder if not impossible to use AppleScript like you can VBA. What is the Numbers equivalent of ODBC? How do you connect pivot tables to external sources? Excel has tremendously more builtin functions. Excel has far better performance, which can start to matter.

Meanwhile Numbers can have field types like star ratings. It uses a fundamentally different visual abstraction. Numbers focuses more on appearance and makes better looking graphs easily out of the box. At the limits of their feature sets though, these are really tools aimed at different audiences. For basic spreadsheet functionality, all of the major spreadsheet programs in the last 2 decades are serviceable.

[dijit]

the major issue the parent eluded to was a sort of sunk cost fallacy that exists in the spreadsheet ecosystem.

Excel is great software, truly, what it enables people to do is impressive (and awful sometimes).

But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools? all of them will have quirks, some will certainly be more powerful in some areas (google docs has the ability to read data direct from bigquery for example).

Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.

Others don't want their investment in learning to be wasted.

Theres a lot of people who are genuinely not incentivised to look at the ecosystem critically.

[tacroqueen]

> But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools?

I suppose that's true to an extent. However one of the reasons spreadsheets in general are so popular is their fluid accessibility. Just about anybody can get right to work even in Excel. Once you've gotten started in Excel there's little incentive to leave. That it offers a full blown powerful programming environment (which is definitely not the best in almost any area) erases much reason to seek alternatives. It's not a situation where Excel is meaningfully less accessible than the alternatives.

> Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.

I mean this is sort of true. It's simple enough and good enough and actually insanely powerful on top of all that. What is the compelling reason to even seek an alternative? (saying this knowing full well that people often do, and usually it's Sheets).

And lack of external data sources is not a small potatoes feature (speaking in reference to Numbers here) - I think that alone puts Excel and Sheets way above Numbers. (And personally I can die happy not seeing another line of AppleScript for the rest of my days).

At least GSuite gives you browser accessibility - and even Excel to a large extent. Numbers ties you to the Mac desktop and iOS crowd. That seems like an already poor incentive to switch. It's great that it works for some people - but it's a niche product, where Excel simply isn't, period.

[dijit]

To be completely fair though, Excel on MacOS is truly not the same software as Excel on Windows; which you will notice very quickly if you're a power-user.

Excel on Linux doesn't exist of course.

[jwr]

I guess it depends how you define "power user". It's true that I don't write any VBA or use ODBC :-)

On the other hand, I do work (daily) on reasonably sized financial spreadsheets, with complex formulas, which also contain graphs, and use "pivot tables" (although I like the naming in Numbers much better, I never quite understood the name "pivot table"), things like conditional highlighting, etc.

I'm just saying that this isn't as clear-cut as some Excel users make it out to be.

[op00to]

> Numbers equivalent of ODBC

The only winning move is not to play.