I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can't say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It's one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
Shame you can't just buy it.
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can't tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace "New" Outlook is.
For Microsoft, "Modern, sleek, streamlined" are just marketing terms for "We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you'll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development."
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
Saying you mastered excel is like saying you mastered meth
I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.
I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I've seen some black magic shit.
When you know Excel really well, it's like Legos for data. If you've got the imagination, intuition, and patience, you can make some incredible stuff.
Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.
Excel masters wish the downloaded an ide a just coded all those tools the have to support now.
This is one of my favorites to share. It's a 3D engine with raytracing with no VBA scripting - all of the calculations are done internally with spreadsheet math.
Used for the right purposes, Excel is an extremely versatile and powerful piece of software. Is use it all the time for analyzing complex financial data and turning pivot tables into really nice looking reports. I can use VBA behind the scenes to change report scenarios while preserving the formatting. Excel is great for things like that.
It's easy to get Into trouble though because eventually someone decides to keep a bunch of auxiliary -- yet somehow very important -- data in a spreadsheet. Before you know it, multiple people are being asked to maintain said data and then POOF! You now have a spreadsheet functioning as a database. It's all downhill from there.
Yeah, but it's the kind of black magic where you accidentally summon Cthulhu and only notice it, after he destroyed half of the city.
Excel is a powerful tool. I was solving system of differential equations with Newton method in it. Sometimes it is easier than in Matlab (or Mathematica) if all you have is good understanding of how step-wise equations should look like, but not the differential equations themselves. Those steps may include if statements, for example.
Had to do a similar project and it took me three full days of back and forth with another software before I found out EXCEL rounds small numbers in very weird ways.
Also, in EXCEL functions/formulas and data/values are wildly mixed.
(Not mentioning a plethora of other mildly infuriating quirks here)
What does it do that LibreOffice Calc doesn't do?
Smooth scrolling.
Kind of serious, the lack of smooth scrolling makes Calc really horrible to use on a touchpad or with large/differing sized cells (formatted sheets with headers and such)
Almost nothing, considering Calc is a clone. I don't think people are excluding LibreOffice from the list of smooth brain apps.
Does libre office do pivot charts?
Matlab excels at dgls, Excel does math not. Newton method isn't it
Dude, I'm a surgical tech - my job is to stand in an OR and be a surgeon's bitch while we're flaying some fucker open. ...and I still spend what feels like 90% of my day on Outlook -_-
Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
I think it's mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can't use Edge for that link, I'm not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
FYI you can change that in settings to launch the systems default browser. Extra steps yes, but the option is there.
In what way? I use it a lot and feel like it's still on par with the older versions. It's got some annoying "Microsoft-y" things typical to them from the last 10 years or so but I think the core functionality is still intact.
The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can't unsee it.
why did you have to say this
Thanks! I can't unsee it but I like it more now 😆
Nope I'm not seeing it personally.
Don't forget LaTeX!
i love compiler errors in my documentation
Please forget LaTeX. Please let us adopt a more modern alternative that isn’t absolutely painful to use.
And yet MATLAB is still on the list 😹
I suggest locking your doors, a very angry crowd is likely to arrive shortly
It's just different use cases. A quick one pager such as memo, summary, short review, etc can all be done in a simple word processor.
Anything thesis-like or scientific, definitely LaTeX. What needs to die is slides in LaTeX however. That is definitely outdated and so restricted. Even libre office PowerPoint is better. But again, the power of math syntax is strong here. You're very likely to see that ugly beamer format in CS and math classes.
I don't get why people need to be in camps. Just use...both?
Being a SOLIDWORKS customer is exactly the same as being a rat in a cage. They are the most aggressively evil I’ve ever experienced. Adobe etc not even close
Not that bad when you sail the high seas
I’ve known people that had authorities show up from that btw
What are some examples? What makes them so much more evil than Adobe?
Garbage software is one of the primary reasons I left my last job despite high pay. It just got too friggin annoying to use. They'd roll out a 'hotfix' to fix something they had broken 3 months earlier and they'd break 2 new things which previously had been working fine for years. The support was so bad I just bought a magic eight ball for our office and we'd ask it our support questions.
Yardi, I'm looking at you.
Damn, I really dodged a bullet there... by them rejecting my application.
The Ribbon interface used on office products isn't there because it's good UX. It exists because there's a software patent on it.
If office didn't use a patented UI, someone could make office software that replicated the UI of MS Office which would allow companies to switch to other products without having to retrain staff.
Microsoft was enshittifying their software long before anyone else.
I did an internship where I was creating a prototype UI for a Windows application, and used the ribbon API to build it. I thought it was a well thought out design, and was definitely an improvement over nested menus. A problem I've seen come up a lot though is shitty implementations where the pattern wasn't followed correctly making it really hard to find things because the developers put items in dumb places.
Generally in UX you want often used buttons to always be in the same place to take advantage of muscle memory. Text is more intuitive than an icon, but an icon will use less screenspace, so once the user learns the icon, you can have an interface that's more user friendly (though less intuitive) so that's fine. Small amount of experience or training needed with the softwareresults in more buttons available at all times, so it's worth the trade off to use one button bar. Less used items should be put into a menu because a) it's not used often so it's fine to be hidden away unless needed and b) it's not used often so the user isn't going to be familiar with an icon so text is preferable.
The ribbon is some weird combination between a menu and a bar with buttons on it. So all of the disadvantages of menu (buttons aren't always on the screen) and all of the disadvantages of button panel (icons that have to be learned for nearly every single feature). The advantages of being able to access the most used features from muscle memory is lost, the advantage of being able to discover lesser used features by simply reading text is lost.
It's just indecisive design. Not putting any thought about how the user actually uses the software, Just chuck some buttons onto a ribbon somewhere, make a pretty icon so it looks good and let the user click on various ribbons an click on random pretty buttons until they find the button that adds an attachment to an email in outlook. But when they find that button, make sure we default to OneDrive instead of the Documents folder because pushing cloud storage is currently the top priority as MS.
Sorry... bit of a rant there. But yeah, just put thought into which features will be used most often make them to be the buttons on the bar, put everything else into a menu. Worst case is the user has to click two things to use a feature, which is the same as using ribbons. Best case the user is clicking the same button they've clicked 100 times before and it's in the exact same place as when they clicked it all of those times before.
Ribbons are just a crime against UX.
I can't use the new MS Office with butchered menu. LibreOffice is more similar to the classic MS Office than MS Office itself.
Oh I hear ya. I have to use MS Office at work, and it's so frustrating. Constant game of "where the fuck did the button go?"
If it wasn't good UX why would other companies want to replicate it? Also, design parents don't last all that long, Ribbon has been around since MS Office 2007, which means it would be at the longest recently out of patent coverage.
If it wasn’t good UX why would other companies want to replicate it?
That question actually answers itself. Because managers of companies use the exact logic you're using. "If big company X is doing this thing, they must have a good reason, so we do the same thing."
MS constantly fails at basic UX. It's not the company anyone should follow when doing UX. But there's a lot of people that don't know what they're doing and just copy someone else hoping they know what they're doing.
If it's patented, how can Sibelius use it in their software?
I used the ribbon API when building a C# GUI. It's just part of the Microsoft application framework. Maybe they prevent other frameworks from using it? Underneath the fancy paint there's not really much to it though, it's just adding a tab bar to a tool bar.
It's been a long time since the ribbon came out. It's possibly expired. If not, a company can enter into a license agreement to use patented technology.
No matter where you stand on your views of the ribbon, Microsoft introduced it in what, 2007? The patent is gonna expire soon.
TBF if you're professionally using MATLAB you're like, sending people to space or modeling atmospheres. Which I guess some of you might do haha.
I’ve used it to simulate things for mechanisms and motors etc for mechanical engineering
MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.
I want to love Julia so much, but it's always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again...
If you don't like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It's for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn't appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.
I am 100% the target audience, have worked on multiple teams that did their 6DOF models in Matlab for GNC and orbital dynamics stuff.
I still think simulink is absolutely terrible. It makes certain things a lot easier to implement but the Git implementation is very nearly useless.
Yep, that hole on the head is perfectly representative.
There's a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
I was going to say: the office environment doesn't suck that much, or rather it's not aimed at people with advanced programing knowledge. Rather everyone else (which is probably the majority in the professional world).
For people who have no or little IT knowledge it's actually very handy.
I've learned a little bit of programming during my studies (mostly R) and I'm now working in a big company.
Power automate is so useful and nearly ALL parts of the office ecosystem is accessible to it. And it's possible to use it with very little coding knowledge.
It's now my main tool of work (with excel).
Me: oracle, oracle and more oracle
Damnit, who put a maze with no exits in this cage?
Maybe you need a career shift bud. As a designer you could absolutely use those softwares!
You didn't use any office apps during your time in school?
I use markdown and convert it to everything else. Using 360 products is painful, but I do what I have to only when I have to.
Yeah, these are two completely different toolsets. Dude ever write a paper or send an email?
a favorite to share: You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky
Thank you!
Business apps at work? Shocking!
They missed using Access incorrectly with too many users and too large of a database.
Engineer in uni vs engineering job?
Python and Excel should be buff wojaks with brainlette heads, they get the work done but ughhhhh to using them.
Shout out to CAD users here!
I use mainly python at work, but usually exit to excel to share the results to other people.
Openpyxl is for you.
I use Pandas, but im sure i have that library installed for Pandas use.
I'm in university and I use both...
I dynamic for crm, SQL
Capitalism somehow means managers know better than you how STEM work should be done. Sigh... get used to it if you want to continue.:-| Make some FOSS on the side for fun?:-)
despite all my rage i'm still just a rat in a cave
I'm sorry for your loss
What is stopping you from proposing better software?
I for one think this demonstrates how overpriced universities are. All of academia is comparable to a ponzi scheme.
That bottom row of wojaks are ableist as hell, I really wish people would stop using them.
Just enable Accessibility settings under Options.
4chan is a perpetual blight on memetic culture
Yeah, I really hate when their shit sticks..
Wojacks are the laziest shit ever. So ugly. So annoying. And yes absolutely ableist and other worthless stereotypes
Your IT is retarded if they won't let you use SOLIDWORKS or python
"Frank, you are the janitor."
It's usually just one manager making a clear case for the business need through the proper channel from being installed in most businesses
