[gloosx]

Can you give me an example of such advanced features? I really don't understand what outstanding feature did they pack in this "Excel" which has no alternative?

If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.

[cturner]

There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.

There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.

The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.

If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.

There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.

Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.

[herbst]

The problem is not the "advanced features" within Excel but how they are used. If an excel sheet is basically just a front for a visual basic Programm it doesn't easily open anywhere.

As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.

However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.

[gloosx]

So the Visual Basic (lol) macros seem to be the only real thing retaining all the people on Excel, interesting...

[zchrykng]

If Microsoft removed it, the financial services industry would crumble.

[gloosx]

To be honest, I will not be upset about this.

[zchrykng]

Hope you never want credit, insurance, mortgages, etc then.

[skobes]

VBA is the famous example, but Power Query deserves a shout out. I use it to make tables that pull their data from other tables with custom transformation logic.

Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.

[Cordiali]

LibreOffice still doesn't have tables! Not to mention the new(ish) functions in Excel, like LET and LAMBDA.

Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.

The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.

Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.

[joseda-hg]

Power Pivot is one I encounter on the regular, you can't even use it on Excel for Mac, Windows or Bust

CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters

PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web

A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz

[clows]

> Can you give me an example of such advanced features?

macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration

I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises.

> I'm sure this is trivial [...].

nope.

[gloosx]

You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked.

But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)

[Philpax]

Please don't make us link the infamous Dropbox HN comment ;)

[gloosx]

I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.

>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.

this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"

[zchrykng]

> I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.

Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.

[p_ing]

SharePoint/OneDrive Lists can be directly edited in Excel. The Power platform can directly access/manipulate/transform Excel files in the cloud or on-prem via the Power BI Gateway.

You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.

[rescbr]

So you do all this work, retrain other users, spend a not-so-trivial amount of time and money and risk breaking stuff, all for not paying $22 monthly per user?

I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.