[version_five]

Working with different businesses I've found that spreadsheets are often used for stuff I would never have thought they would be. Mainly like having large multi paragraph text in the cells, but using the rows and columns to index it. I can see why this is preferred over a linear word style document, there's an opportunity for someone to find a better way that combines spreadsheet like visual referencing with a good UI for entering stuff in the "cells". Excel is awful for this, for example having to remember to press Alt+enter and not being able to scroll smoothly down through cells (so if one cell takes up the screen vertically all you can do is snap to the next). Anyway, drafting a message in a spreadsheet is not that unreasonable or at least not uncommon.

[Affric]

It speaks to both the genius that exists within the design of the spreadsheet digital document format, the effectiveness of excel's implementation (and microsoft's business), and the dismal state of IT empowerment and education that there is nothing you could show me implemented on an excel spreadsheet in a business that would surprise me.

It goes from the obvious stuff like DBs to Hypercard clones to really far out stuff when you get to shared documents.

Excel gets so much wrong but having sampled some of the competition and being proficient in programming at this point of my life I can only admire it and people who go deep.

[awad]

I continue to maintain that Excel is the single most important piece of software created in the history of humanity by sheer virtue of how much of the world runs on it, whether via intended use case or not.

[arthurcolle]

when I worked at $BANK most traders had reimplemented their own DB using INDEX/MATCH and honestly it is a super powerful model when you get the hang of it. Obviously insane to support "at scale" but it is what it is. #ExcelGangRiseUp

[jrockway]

I did a little bit of this supporting when I worked at a bank. Apparently there is multicast networking that you can plug into spreadsheets, so the "output" of a spreadsheet can be used as inputs on other people's workstations and it updates in real time. (I would say this was before Google Docs was a thing, but I don't think it actually was. But Google Docs wasn't widely used anywhere at the time.)

This all blew up one day causing the bank to lose money. My team was supposed to fix it or whatever, because we were the "market data" team. I ended up writing a small program to send a multicast message and record how long it took to come back, and graphed it over time with ... rrdtool! Once the network/transport layer was ruled out as the problem, some trader came back and said it was a bug in their spreadsheet. (This was of course months of early morning conference calls. But having data about the network was a new thing.)

(Oh yeah, someone complained that the author of rrdtool's name appeared on all the charts, so I patched it to not do that. Sorry. Sometimes open source is more about the taking than the giving :( I was young and naive.)