this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024

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despite all my rage IT keeps me trapped like a rat in a cage. (mander.xyz)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 232 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 9 months ago (2 children)

i heard you like a little database in your excel

[–] [email protected] 81 points 9 months ago (11 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I am horrified and amazed

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

Mostly horrified.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.

Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can't be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.

Including running a 3D graphics engine... with raytracing

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can. It's expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don't need PowerPoint or a word processor, I'd rather it not be included in the price at all.

Also, they've made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that's the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that's a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

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."

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 9 months ago (6 children)

I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I've seen some black magic shit.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (3 children)

And between knowing Excel like you've described and knowing only the basics exists an uncanny valley of being able to create some truly revolting abominations. Additionally when all you know is Excel, every problem becomes a spreadsheet, for better or for worse (usually the latter).

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (5 children)

What does it do that LibreOffice Calc doesn't do?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

Almost nothing, considering Calc is a clone. I don't think people are excluding LibreOffice from the list of smooth brain apps.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Not lagging horribly with big tables after calculating a simple formula? That's the only thing i can think of. Everything else is just very similar

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 -_-

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think you're supposed to Inlook during surgery.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

ERMAHGERD! I fucking love torturing my coworkers with medical dadjokes. I am bookmarking this in my brain, and will steal it when the opportunity presents.

The groans and facepalms will be glorious!

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can't unsee it.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Don't forget LaTeX!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Self-flagilation is a little far for me.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

i love compiler errors in my documentation

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

matlab

visible-disgust

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (4 children)

MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (9 children)

There's a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You're probably at the wrong job then.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

Solidworks, Matlab is not exactly what you call CHAD open-source tech as opposed to Python where you can get shit done with it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Me: oracle, oracle and more oracle

Damnit, who put a maze with no exits in this cage?

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