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.
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.
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.”
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn’t reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don’t want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there’s probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can’t exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
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.
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.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
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.
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.
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 -_-
The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can’t unsee it.
Thanks! I can’t unsee it but I like it more now 😆
why did you have to say this
Nope I’m not seeing it personally.
Don’t forget LaTeX!
Self-flagilation is a little far for me.
Once your over the hump, it’s a pleasure to use relative to word. Especially if your document gets large or has lots of maths in it.
How can you say that with a straight face when you like Matlab?
I mean, the MATLAB wojak has a dent in its skull, which feels pretty accurate. There is a ton of complex, niche, and (for those within the niche) incredibly useful software in the various Toolboxes, all developed with those fat stacks of MATLAB money. But it’s all piloted with the MATLAB language, which is just one of the worst things ever for oh so very many reasons.
And it’s wildly expensive.
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’m all ears.
I’ve been using Typst. Its (mostly) open source and much simpler than LaTeX. It’s still very new though, so it doesn’t have all of LaTeX’s features, but it’s making very steady progress.
Seems a bit early to declare an end to Latex then. According to you some use cases aren’t supported. What isn’t open source about it?
Don’t get me wrong, Latex has lots of weird quirks, and you made it sound like there were a few obvious options to replace it. But Typst doesn’t look like is ready for prime time.
I wasn’t trying to imply that Typst is a replacement for LaTeX. I’m more trying to say that I’m hoping Typst (and any other typesetting alternatives that might be out there) mature enough over the next year or two to become full replacements. It just doesn’t seem to be gaining much attention because of how dominant LaTeX is.
The main part that’s not open source is their web client, which I’m fine with. There’s a number of people on GitHub that aren’t happy about it though.
I see. It’s been a while since I last used Latex in college. Back then Kylyx was still in it’s infancy and I anyway had a established workflow with Makefiles. It seemed to me back then that the steady progress in user interface of Latex tools (like Kylyx and etc.) would be enough to make it more accessible.
Just like you have great coding IDEs nowadays with AI code completion helpers, something similar could be done for Latex. Incremental compilers for Markdown allow you to see changes in real-time in some editors, would be nice to have something of the sort for Latex. With these two and a context sensitive syntax helper (Clippy, but not annoying), and you have a killer solution. And one that is backwards compatible with all the tools that have been developed for Latex in these past decades.
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?
I mean more that LaTeX’s syntax and compilation methods are outdated. I’ve tried to grok LaTeX many times, but the most I’ve ever been able to do is make small modifications to existing templates. I’ve never been able to make a brand new project work. I’m really hoping that modern alternatives like Typst become more common. There just don’t seem to be many out there because of how dominant LaTeX is.
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.
MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.
Yep, that hole on the head is perfectly representative.
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.
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.
There’s a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
I hate power automate so so so much
Why?
I guess I’m so used to thinking in code, and power automate seems hell-bent on being aimed at More business oriented folks. I find it extremely unintuitive, and downright hostile in terms of actually getting something done that I know how to do, but I’m not allowed to.
100%. Power automate doing anything other than the templates they have is almost always harder than just writing python
I think you nailed it. Why as a developer admin in a corporation one would use powerautomate? At my last job I had to, as I dodnt have machines to physically run some tools and automation my team needed, or access to higher level stuff but that sounds to me like an Oracle sysadmin complaining that Access is a pain in the ass, just don’t use it…
That’s why I use Powershell with the Graph API module. Of course running scripts is probably disabled for non admins.
Power automate has so much potential and promise, but it just sucks to implement anything more than built in templates.
I think i never used a built i template
The licensing process is very confusing for starters.
Hardly an end user problem though? I’m used to get it through corporate deals at work and in an organisation I volunteer for. Slightly different setups and access to tools but not through end of the world
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).
You’re probably at the wrong job then.
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?
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Python and Excel should be buff wojaks with brainlette heads, they get the work done but ughhhhh to using them.
Engineer in uni vs engineering job?
