 Excel fucking rules. I mean, it's shit, but all software is shit. Excel is the best of the software shit-pile. I will never scold a non-technical person or organization for using Excel, which 99.999% of the time is a perfectly acceptable tool for the job. (I'd link an article about the alleged Excel errors that caused a miscount in COVID cases in the UK but there is wildly conflicting information and I don't know what to trust.) No comments | Expand all CWs
[DATA EXPUNGED]
 @darius I won't give people a hard time for just the reasons you state. I only get a little sad for all of us once we start to try to use Excel for things that it just wasn't meant to do. And then everybody's workload increases and the errors increase etc. But Excel (or spreadsheets in general) is definitely a local maximum for some forms of computing and UI. @darius I've seen someone do most of the Advent of Code programming challenges in Excel. I'm not sure if that means Excel is very good or very very bad but I'm leaning towards the former.   @darius Excel did more for the democratization of computing than most other software. Still it's absolute shit and I'm not sure it would have to be that way (e.g. imagine if it did a little less automatic data coercion)  It would've been better if it didn't turn random things into dates when you least expect. |
Gregory's Server
@darius as much as I absolutely despise Excel, I can't but agree with you on this. If it wasn't absolute garbage, it would be too complicated for people to use, and thanks to the fact that people can use it, it has allowed a lot of people to actually benefit from computers.
Or to put it another way, without Excel, most people's sole use of computers would be a communication tool