[LarMachinarum]

while I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary, these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on Excel as their go-to tool for everything:

be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead…

…often leading to problems down the line when the limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't made) would show more and more but they wasted already so much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they would be even more reluctant to the possibility of switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.

[sgarland]

Another reason I did so (at a different job, actually, the one immediately prior to Samsung) was that the only other language I knew to any degree was Python, and while I did compile one Python program for Windows to more easily distribute it, Excel Just Worked.

That one estimated nominal and peak loading on electrical distribution circuits by querying a DB for consumption on a given branch, and comparing it to a table containing current handling capabilities of various kinds of ACSR (overhead power lines). It was easier to do that in Excel because people were already used to it for various calculations.

Also if you’re wondering, yes, we had some bespoke software whose name escapes me that was specifically created to model electrical circuits; unfortunately no one knew how to use it, but one guy thought he did, and convinced management that we didn’t need to pay for training because he would train everyone else. He did not.

[deepsun]

In hotel industry they need to calculate and set a price for each room/night. Typically that's done by solving convex optimization (e.g. simplex method) and using "shadow values" from it as the price per room.

Lo and behold, not every math package provides "shadow values". So you either buy a specialized math tool, or... use Excel, that has it built-in.

[tracker1]

The VBA hammer is real... it can force any screw, nail, staple into any hole you desire.

Until the web version takes over, and you can no longer connect to anything real.

[john01dav]

I doubt that the people who use Excel care enough about computers to be deterred by cloud.

[tracker1]

The cloud version of Office365 Excel doesn't use/support VBA iirc. It also won't support, for example, connecting directly to a database.

[giardini]

Last night enjoyed reading the HN topic

"Lessons from writing a Kubernetes Security book" at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44784495

all about the joys and problems developers encounter using kubernetes/k8.

And reading now, today here about Excel/VBA, it struck me that something was missing: couldn't I eliminate 90% of computer software and ease 80% of software devops simply by building/selling a system that ran purely Excel atop kubernetes?

I mean, isn't that all there is to computing nowadays? Plus a little social media? And some AI for fun and maybe a little Excel/k8 work as frosting on the cake.

EDIT: Upon some further thought and prompting by helpful anonymous others, I have found a slightly different path: a FORTH/kubernetes system that will be used to bootstrap versions of VBA & Excel to the cloud. This will be made available to the great unwashed masses of humanity (and their AI friends) for implementing social media for all.