I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets.
Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad.
You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good.
The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over 'proper' software, databases etc is portability and auditability.
Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.
This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures.
If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it.
One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.
I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.
Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.
> One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
This! I love Cursor’s IDE but, boy, does it really sh*t me off everytime I update it and they remove the keybinding for CMD + SHFT + L.
Like, seriously, you couldn’t chose a different combination for your added feature’s shortcut!?
It’s not like the ‘find all instances of’ shortcut is some hidden, unused gem, which you have to tickle the Gruffalo in order to access! It’s one of the most important shortcuts!
Well it might be replaced by another spreadsheet. Maybe one that does actual innovation. I don't think people in the 80s ever thought that Lotus 1-2-3 would go away.
Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much.
In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.
Spreadsheets let you click any field and understand where it came from. Excel can be thought of as an amazing post-execution debugger where you can get a previous output and value for almost any piece of memory ("cell"). I would love a debugger that could do this post-execution for some output.
> If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them?
Your point, which is completely true, is not incompatible with GP's statement.
Excel is ubiquitous in the corporate world and most spreasheet in the corporate world are completely full of errors everywhere.
Not just errors but also broken assumptions.
I've been tasked with porting a spreadsheet to a dedicated app because people noticed numbers were off and, oh the clusterfuck. Never again.
The world started making much more sense to me from the moment I realized most business decisions were taken based on powerpoint presentation containing numbers coming from broken Excel spreadsheets.
I totally agree with this. I've always found debugging Excel spreadsheets to be a real challenge.
I work in accountancy and while its possible to audit the output of the spreadsheet, (as I'm sure it's possible to audit the output in other domains) as an erstwhile Software Engineer I can't help but think it would be better if I could better verify the integrity of the spreadsheet itself. It's far too easy to introduce unnoticed errors.
Other people have different views on this but I love the idea of spreadsheets but I don't like any spreadsheet software. I think there's massive room for improvement. But if you were to ask me how to improve it specifically, I couldn't really pinpoint anything.
I had a go at doing something in this space to scratch a very specific itch but of course, it doesn't address any of my complaints here. Rather, it tried to tackle another of my complaints - the lack of good support for different number bases https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Ivycel/
And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good enough" for basic, simple stuff but for anything more it's a real productivity killer.
This. I had similar experiences with LibreOffice. It can choke on what you'd think were pretty mundane and reasonably sized things. I imported a CSV file of 15K lines once and it used all available memory on my PC doing it. The optimization that goes into Excel is one of those "unsung hero" things that doesn't get a lot of glory but it is clutch day in and day out.
I worked in a place where excel was used for ad-hoc calculations. We became a Google shop.
Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.
For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel.
In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization.
That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson.
I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).
I remember my attempts to use numbers on a mac to pull up some spreadsheets.
It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW.
Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.
The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming.
If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?
The real problem isn’t with Excel itself. The problem is VBA and even Microsoft has been trying to kill it with JavaScript and future python support. I don’t feel that even MS can kill VBA since it’s so ubiquitous on Excel into the day that the majority of users transition to Excel online.
If MSFT are serious about this, they need to make migration easier. Right now they half heartedly point you at javascript and excel plugins and walk away. When Record Macro gives you the option of recording in JavaScript, not VBA, then we'll talk.
What is wrong with VBA? Aside from a few syntax quirks, like no short circuits in if statements, it is a very easy language to learn and use. And, the syntax hinting (IntelliSense?) is incredible.
It's almost too easy to hit up https://sheets.new whenever I get an idea.
Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer.
I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time.
10 years ago I joined a consulting company as a data science intern. I arrived at work with my MacBook. I learned about excel in courses but had never used in my daily life: I use csv and SQLite for "data-heavy" cases and Numbers for intuitive cases (never coded inside it). When someone shares an excel sheet with me, I open with Numbers with no problem.
On day 1 I realized my work was to deal with several excel sheets of 10~50MB, with huge amount of VBA scripts, rule-based highlighting, charts... They even wrote an internally used extension for those files. Numbers could not handle and crashed.
I need Excel. I asked if I could borrow a PC laptop from the company, no, that's not for interns. I need to bring my own device. I asked if they would pay for Microsoft Office to get installed on my personal MacBook. The answer was obvious, what are you thinking? I had to manage to get Excel for myself, while the full salary they paid me was not enough to cover a license.
I left consulting after that experience and end up working as a "real" data scientist. Nothing like that happened ever. I collaborate with colleagues using different IDEs/editors everyday. If an accountant joins us and tells me notepad is all you need, I would highly respect his choice and continue with my editor. We don't need to argue, our codebase is not locked in any tools.
I keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows.
You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.
This hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.
So by your logic, if the entire audit world used Numbers, you would be using Numbers. That isn’t remotely close to the rationale for why we don’t code BASIC in Notepad and is probably the reason why people here find Excel to be a less than ideal choice. We use the right tool for the job, not the tool that all of the industry uses because we would be screwed otherwise.
Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small.
In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment.
The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone.
Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong)
But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences.
Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.
You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.
I think you misunderstand 'workflows' in business. This is not a case of ingesting a large amount of data, transform, analyse etc.
A normal finance team gets constant one off requests for information. Download something from the ERP, lookup against something else, pivot it by department. Then you get a follow up for the same but with x excluded, but they need it in 10 minutes before a meeting. Excel is great for that.
Then there are the dozens of files behind accounting records. Take a Fixed Asset Register (since it is at the top of the balance sheet), a list of your assets and their depreciation schedule. Maybe your ERP doesn't have one, or your company didn't buy that module, or you have a special class off asset that doesn't fit in it. Maybe they coded it for one country, but in your country the rules are different, so it ends up in Excel.
Then maybe you have a bank account and you have cheques that are posted to your ledger but have not cleared the actual bank yet. Then you have items on your real account that you couldn't post yet, maybe someone paid you with no reference. So you keep a little Excel reconciliation to check.
Then inventory, maybe the ERP didn't split it in the way your consolidation needs it, so you transform the data in Excel and reconcile it back
Then you have all the things that belong in this accounting period but haven't been billed yet, so you have a running list of accruals and when they will reverse. Then you have all the things that are posted in this period but relate to later periods, so you keep a prepayments file. Maybe both of these spit out a journal to upload back to the ERP and reconcile the balance.
Then you get a download of the payroll for the month, but you need to rearrange it into net pay, gross pay, taxes paid by the employee, taxes paid by the employer, pension contributions... then you have to split it by cost centre too. This could be coded, but it is different in every country... and the cost centres keep changing, and the analysis head office wants keeps changing... so it goes in Excel.
Then I want to verify that the system posted the correct absorption to inventory, so I paste in an inventory report and a TB and last month's reconciliation updates.
I can code, but I can't maintain 100 pieces of software that change all the time. I also need all the people in the chain to be able to follow it....
And yes, finance people know how to apply the famous 'checks and balances' to keep out most classes of mistakes....and to detect the same mistakes made by the engineered 'proper software' we have to work with.
> Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). ... It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.
This is an elitist software engineer's take.
People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. It's people using general-purpose computers as general-purpose computers. It's the closest to the personal computing dream that we've come, and likely the closest we ever will.
The alternative in the real world isn't "everyone learns Python", it's "we lock normal business people out of computing and keep it in the hands of the trained and very expensive software engineers". That's not going to happen, and it's frankly not something we should want to happen.
I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable. We miss the decades that the company ran very successfully without any software engineers on the payroll and see the giant spaghetti mess that made them finally decide it was worth the cost. But it's important to remember that these same businesses reached the point where they could afford to pay us to build something custom by building a successful business on top of Excel.
I would temper your hot take.
Nothing you described is a feature specific to Excel from what I can tell, and using Excel in front of an ERP is most likely an anti-pattern as the ERP is meant to handle reporting and authorization in a centralized way.
The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up?
But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?
Nearly everyone who knows how to use a computer knows how to use Excel to some extent. That is a feature of Excel that pretty much no other software solution can bring to the table.
Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply being a piece of software means that they could adapt it to do all kinds of things that are better fulfilled by a different tool. Just because they adapted it to make it a database and a spreadsheet hybrid thing doesn't mean it was also the right thing to do. It was the thing to do that made them money and have them capture market share.
Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better.
So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes.
It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.
> Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job.
On the contrary, in many domains in life the right tool for the job is almost always going to be the one that everyone is already using. It's usually not the most satisfying tool or the most elegant, and its use will usually make perfectionists scream, but if you're actually interested in getting anything done you'll default to using the tool that the human beings in the system are already comfortable with unless it would be completely impossible to do so.
As another example: the NEMA connector is objectively bad compared to modern alternatives, but it's not going anywhere. The benefits of standardization usually outweigh the benefits of optimization, and you usually don't benefit from being the first to move to the "better" solution.
(I realize that last part is difficult to swallow for a forum that's focused on startups trying to disrupt the existing, standardized tech.)
The problem is that most of the time what software engineers say is "better" just isn't.
Suddenly instead of being comfortable using the tool themselves, they have to request engineer time to update the UI. Instead of being able to write whatever weird excel formulas they have they maybe now need to learn SQL. Maybe they "should" but that is kind of besides the point
Excel is probably the most useful application ever made. Pretty much every professional services implementation and technical account management engagement is done via excel.
For me, I've used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It's super easy at this point to see anything with it.
It's well worth any price for sure. It's really the only reason I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I've used more than 2% of it.
I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.
Google Sheets is great, but I'm probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a more robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.
I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one.
Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation?
I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.
To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.
> It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.
I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts.
You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel.
What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?
>don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics
so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces"
every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same.
so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each pointsize are all separate fonts, and that's what he might have too many of.
Try it with more memory and/or larger swapfile space on your drive.
It might be OK until 8 specialty fonts need to be reproduced beyond a certain number of cells. If more memory was all it takes to fix, that would be good to know.
Running 32-bit Excel mitigates quite a few of the limits. Sadly, I haven't managed to get WoW64 DLLs to load in 64-bit Excel: that would eliminate the majority of the issues, but it's tricky to set that up in the first place without the ability to store 64-bit return values (e.g. handles).
I can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.
I had a friend who used Excel to render blueprints for the dream house she was designing. As an architecture student, I was both impressed and horrified!
This is a very basic article compared to the conversation here.
Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis.
As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn't trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%.
I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is.
Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.
So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
> Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.
FWIW one my frustrations with Excel is how it does freezing of rows. I find Google's appraoch more intuitive. But the issues on computation I agree with (see my other comment on this post).
I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better.
One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.
While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this.
How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle:
1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances
2. Year-over-year analysis
3. Category management
4. Historical tracking
Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?
I suspect that your database background is causing you to think too formally about how people structure Excel data. For the vast majority, they’re not normalizing data, running queries on sheets, etc. I can easily see this as one tab per account, then pulling in specific cells on other tabs for summaries and other analysis.
There are many ways to skin a cat, but my advice how to try it an excel way (assuming a db backgound) would be..
try dumber things, sounds stupid but you dont need rules and structure, just data :)
denormalise a more often to break down the problem, the data and problem are your goal not structure (as much as db).
Yes period per tab type of thing is quite common, as at some point you want to close the period and never change it.
Lean into the non-standardisation to handle the real world. E.g for most of your budget its one line per item per month but this one are flexes with headcount so that has its own page, and tax is balnced in month x so ill just over type all the formulae there when the real numbers come in.
Also if the model is complex try naming fields and showing the formula in a cell next to it to remind you how its calculated (if not ready using it check out "format as table" to do this for tabular data)
And yes pivot the crap out of everything.
There is also "add to model" which gives you powerbi type modelling in excel which can also be handy and fast.
Not extensive list, and for lots of things db is better when you know how to use it.. but those are some of the "i get it" scenarios for me
I’m not the commenter that you’re replying to but I always get a different “feel” when using a native application like Excel than a web app. I can type as fast as I can think, switching cells, typing values, invoking keyboard shortcuts, etc, and every keystroke is interpreted as I intended. It’s incredible what’s been achieved in modern web apps like Google Sheets, but I still feel like I need to slow down at times to watch what the app is up to - making sure the cell was selected in the UI before entering text or watching to be sure the browser didn’t intercept a shortcut, etc.
Robust macro capability (VBA>AppScript), more advanced data analysis/validation and charting, easy integration with SQL/PBI, a mature add-in market.
And less tangible: it just feels much faster. I don't have any data for this last claim, it's purely based on personal experience. Although, when I use web Excel, this edge goes away.
And I don't use local files at all with Excel. Everything is either in OneDrive or SharePoint, accessible through web or app on whatever platform.
These days, I prefer google sheets for most things spreadsheet, but Excel is far and away more capable, and after a certain level of complexity, just unbelievably fast in comparison. Complex sheets in Google Sheets get bogged down very quickly, and the data-access support is weaker and handles errors very poorly.
If you do any serious financial planning for a startup or small business, Excel is vastly superior to Google Sheets. The multi sheet formulas can get very complicated and web based tools can’t perform as well as desktop software.
Google Sheets doesnt have Solver in the consumer version for one.
In reference to your second statement though, I also dont always carry my laptop but it doesn't matter because my spreadhseets are in onedrive too, so I can close my laptop and open my phone and have the same spreadsheet with zero thought.
> One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.
Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?
“Balancing a checking account” in American vernacular is typically used to mean reconciling the transactions your bank has posted to the spend you’ve tracked.
This used to be more important when you wrote paper checks and received a monthly paper statement from your bank. Most people who “balance” their accounts today seem primarily concerned that they are adhering to their personal budget. But the term remains.
It's very uncommon to use them for any common expenses like groceries or gas. I use them for a quarterly HOA payment, yearly CPA tax preparation, petty government fines and fees, and donations to charity. Generally things that you mail a payment for and you want a record of the payment. Most of these I could do electronically but I don't really save any time doing so because of the friction of setting up the payment.
Many of us still write them semi-regularly although many are "written" by the bank. I admit that I keep my eye on my banking account online but otherwise don't pay a lot of attention day to day. Far larger amounts of cash are flowing through my credit cards than any individual direct payments.
Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story.
The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan.
In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise.
More recent times.
Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn't envy him his task.
"Please, not just Excel." I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data.
"Rinse-and-repeat Excel". I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this.
And that's it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I'm thankful that I haven't had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.
There were millions of spreadsheet users by 1986, as VisiCalc was released in 1979[0] and similar programs like SuperCalc[1] were also in use. They were both ported to IBM PC and saw significant use in the corporate world prior to and including 1986.
This is one of the things LLM's have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done.
I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spreadsheets explained in easy to understand terms for comparably non tech users a lot of stuff became easy to do. As llm had detailed usually correct answers and suggestions. I would have learned my way to doing it anyway but LLM's brought the learning curve down from a few hours to a few min so was willing to just use libre office.
Good old LibreOffice. I too fall back on that when Sheets fails me. It takes effort to justify Excel (or even Office) licenses in my workplace, but LibreOffice is available and approved for use. I won't say the 90s era interface impresses me, but it has become a shockingly solid product.
I doubt that. Pandas is stupidly powerful... for raw data, experiments, and ML model training/inference. But in my experience it rapidly becomes an esoteric box at times when you need to get data back out of it.
I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files.
Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.
You should check out Row Zero (https://rowzero.io). We launched on HN earlier this year. Our CSV handling is the best on the market.
You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.
or skip the spreadsheet and go relational with DuckDB. Pretty cool to run directly against a set of CSVs and get performant, results in a language most of us already know and use regularly.
Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.
I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.
>But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do
The interface is customizable. You can remove any icons or group of icons on the ribbon that you don't like and you can reorganize them in any way you want. Just right click on the ribbon and click "customize the ribbon".
Readit News
Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad.
You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good.
The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over 'proper' software, databases etc is portability and auditability.
Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.
If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it.
One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.
This! I love Cursor’s IDE but, boy, does it really sh*t me off everytime I update it and they remove the keybinding for CMD + SHFT + L.
Like, seriously, you couldn’t chose a different combination for your added feature’s shortcut!?
It’s not like the ‘find all instances of’ shortcut is some hidden, unused gem, which you have to tickle the Gruffalo in order to access! It’s one of the most important shortcuts!
Can you give an example? I am unaware of such power.
If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them?
https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa...
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...
In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.
Now think of 100 pieces of software that you are confident are 100% error free?
Your point, which is completely true, is not incompatible with GP's statement.
Excel is ubiquitous in the corporate world and most spreasheet in the corporate world are completely full of errors everywhere.
Not just errors but also broken assumptions.
I've been tasked with porting a spreadsheet to a dedicated app because people noticed numbers were off and, oh the clusterfuck. Never again.
The world started making much more sense to me from the moment I realized most business decisions were taken based on powerpoint presentation containing numbers coming from broken Excel spreadsheets.
I work in accountancy and while its possible to audit the output of the spreadsheet, (as I'm sure it's possible to audit the output in other domains) as an erstwhile Software Engineer I can't help but think it would be better if I could better verify the integrity of the spreadsheet itself. It's far too easy to introduce unnoticed errors.
Other people have different views on this but I love the idea of spreadsheets but I don't like any spreadsheet software. I think there's massive room for improvement. But if you were to ask me how to improve it specifically, I couldn't really pinpoint anything.
I had a go at doing something in this space to scratch a very specific itch but of course, it doesn't address any of my complaints here. Rather, it tried to tackle another of my complaints - the lack of good support for different number bases https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Ivycel/
Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.
For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel.
In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization.
That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson.
I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).
It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW.
Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.
If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?
It's the original agile, functional programming environment. Code iteration and basic testing is done in microseconds.
I remember laughing very hard when someone excitedly told me about REPL in python, like it was a new idea.
Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer.
I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time.
https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png
I don't think Excel offers anything like this.
On day 1 I realized my work was to deal with several excel sheets of 10~50MB, with huge amount of VBA scripts, rule-based highlighting, charts... They even wrote an internally used extension for those files. Numbers could not handle and crashed.
I need Excel. I asked if I could borrow a PC laptop from the company, no, that's not for interns. I need to bring my own device. I asked if they would pay for Microsoft Office to get installed on my personal MacBook. The answer was obvious, what are you thinking? I had to manage to get Excel for myself, while the full salary they paid me was not enough to cover a license.
I left consulting after that experience and end up working as a "real" data scientist. Nothing like that happened ever. I collaborate with colleagues using different IDEs/editors everyday. If an accountant joins us and tells me notepad is all you need, I would highly respect his choice and continue with my editor. We don't need to argue, our codebase is not locked in any tools.
You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.
I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.
And people are aware of it but they don't know where the faults are and need to go forward anyway.
So they must act as if nothing could be wrong, and if something does come up later on it can be treated as a complete surprise to everyone concerned.
With that kind of acting, how about how far the bar has been lowered on even more critical decisions? :\
Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct.
(And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)
At best it’s an arranged marriage, at worst it’s Stockholme syndrome.
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In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment.
The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone.
Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong)
But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences.
Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.
You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.
A normal finance team gets constant one off requests for information. Download something from the ERP, lookup against something else, pivot it by department. Then you get a follow up for the same but with x excluded, but they need it in 10 minutes before a meeting. Excel is great for that.
Then there are the dozens of files behind accounting records. Take a Fixed Asset Register (since it is at the top of the balance sheet), a list of your assets and their depreciation schedule. Maybe your ERP doesn't have one, or your company didn't buy that module, or you have a special class off asset that doesn't fit in it. Maybe they coded it for one country, but in your country the rules are different, so it ends up in Excel.
Then maybe you have a bank account and you have cheques that are posted to your ledger but have not cleared the actual bank yet. Then you have items on your real account that you couldn't post yet, maybe someone paid you with no reference. So you keep a little Excel reconciliation to check.
Then inventory, maybe the ERP didn't split it in the way your consolidation needs it, so you transform the data in Excel and reconcile it back
Then you have all the things that belong in this accounting period but haven't been billed yet, so you have a running list of accruals and when they will reverse. Then you have all the things that are posted in this period but relate to later periods, so you keep a prepayments file. Maybe both of these spit out a journal to upload back to the ERP and reconcile the balance.
Then you get a download of the payroll for the month, but you need to rearrange it into net pay, gross pay, taxes paid by the employee, taxes paid by the employer, pension contributions... then you have to split it by cost centre too. This could be coded, but it is different in every country... and the cost centres keep changing, and the analysis head office wants keeps changing... so it goes in Excel.
Then I want to verify that the system posted the correct absorption to inventory, so I paste in an inventory report and a TB and last month's reconciliation updates.
I can code, but I can't maintain 100 pieces of software that change all the time. I also need all the people in the chain to be able to follow it....
And yes, finance people know how to apply the famous 'checks and balances' to keep out most classes of mistakes....and to detect the same mistakes made by the engineered 'proper software' we have to work with.
I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.
This is an elitist software engineer's take.
People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. It's people using general-purpose computers as general-purpose computers. It's the closest to the personal computing dream that we've come, and likely the closest we ever will.
The alternative in the real world isn't "everyone learns Python", it's "we lock normal business people out of computing and keep it in the hands of the trained and very expensive software engineers". That's not going to happen, and it's frankly not something we should want to happen.
I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable. We miss the decades that the company ran very successfully without any software engineers on the payroll and see the giant spaghetti mess that made them finally decide it was worth the cost. But it's important to remember that these same businesses reached the point where they could afford to pay us to build something custom by building a successful business on top of Excel.
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The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up?
But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?
Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better.
So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes.
It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.
On the contrary, in many domains in life the right tool for the job is almost always going to be the one that everyone is already using. It's usually not the most satisfying tool or the most elegant, and its use will usually make perfectionists scream, but if you're actually interested in getting anything done you'll default to using the tool that the human beings in the system are already comfortable with unless it would be completely impossible to do so.
As another example: the NEMA connector is objectively bad compared to modern alternatives, but it's not going anywhere. The benefits of standardization usually outweigh the benefits of optimization, and you usually don't benefit from being the first to move to the "better" solution.
(I realize that last part is difficult to swallow for a forum that's focused on startups trying to disrupt the existing, standardized tech.)
Suddenly instead of being comfortable using the tool themselves, they have to request engineer time to update the UI. Instead of being able to write whatever weird excel formulas they have they maybe now need to learn SQL. Maybe they "should" but that is kind of besides the point
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For me, I've used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It's super easy at this point to see anything with it.
It's well worth any price for sure. It's really the only reason I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I've used more than 2% of it.
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Google Sheets is great, but I'm probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a more robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.
Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation?
I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.
Serifs in increasing somberness for the most concrete numbers, sans for everyday estimates, and papyrus whenever I just toss random numbers in.
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I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts.
You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel.
What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?
so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces"
every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same.
so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each pointsize are all separate fonts, and that's what he might have too many of.
It might be OK until 8 specialty fonts need to be reproduced beyond a certain number of cells. If more memory was all it takes to fix, that would be good to know.
Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?
Thanks, you completed my bingo card.
Why do I now doubt your assertion?
Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis.
As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn't trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%.
I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is.
Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.
So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
FWIW one my frustrations with Excel is how it does freezing of rows. I find Google's appraoch more intuitive. But the issues on computation I agree with (see my other comment on this post).
One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.
You will pry Excel from my cold dead hands.
How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances 2. Year-over-year analysis 3. Category management 4. Historical tracking
Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?
try dumber things, sounds stupid but you dont need rules and structure, just data :)
denormalise a more often to break down the problem, the data and problem are your goal not structure (as much as db).
Yes period per tab type of thing is quite common, as at some point you want to close the period and never change it.
Lean into the non-standardisation to handle the real world. E.g for most of your budget its one line per item per month but this one are flexes with headcount so that has its own page, and tax is balnced in month x so ill just over type all the formulae there when the real numbers come in.
Also if the model is complex try naming fields and showing the formula in a cell next to it to remind you how its calculated (if not ready using it check out "format as table" to do this for tabular data)
And yes pivot the crap out of everything.
There is also "add to model" which gives you powerbi type modelling in excel which can also be handy and fast.
Not extensive list, and for lots of things db is better when you know how to use it.. but those are some of the "i get it" scenarios for me
And less tangible: it just feels much faster. I don't have any data for this last claim, it's purely based on personal experience. Although, when I use web Excel, this edge goes away.
And I don't use local files at all with Excel. Everything is either in OneDrive or SharePoint, accessible through web or app on whatever platform.
In reference to your second statement though, I also dont always carry my laptop but it doesn't matter because my spreadhseets are in onedrive too, so I can close my laptop and open my phone and have the same spreadsheet with zero thought.
Tables.
Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?
Assuming that this relates to checks/cheques, are they going away in the US?
This used to be more important when you wrote paper checks and received a monthly paper statement from your bank. Most people who “balance” their accounts today seem primarily concerned that they are adhering to their personal budget. But the term remains.
The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan.
In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise.
More recent times.
Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn't envy him his task.
"Please, not just Excel." I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data.
"Rinse-and-repeat Excel". I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this.
And that's it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I'm thankful that I haven't had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.
There were millions of spreadsheet users by 1986, as VisiCalc was released in 1979[0] and similar programs like SuperCalc[1] were also in use. They were both ported to IBM PC and saw significant use in the corporate world prior to and including 1986.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc
I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spreadsheets explained in easy to understand terms for comparably non tech users a lot of stuff became easy to do. As llm had detailed usually correct answers and suggestions. I would have learned my way to doing it anyway but LLM's brought the learning curve down from a few hours to a few min so was willing to just use libre office.
When I set Win 11 or earlier version PCs for others, I always load up Void Tools "Everything" and then swing by FossHUB for the full set of tools.
Libre Office, Inkscape, and many more all go on the machine.
And then I explain what they just got and what it is worth. Almost everyone ends up being able to use the OSS tools.
Doing this saves a ton of money!
The rest, yes I love OSS tools on Windows.
But have fun when their important word docs get garbled
(it's an example, do not come after me with some "uuuh acually word docs open fine now")
Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.
You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.
It’s ironic that you cite the one thing that being bad at hasn’t held Excel back. ;)
The interface is customizable. You can remove any icons or group of icons on the ribbon that you don't like and you can reorganize them in any way you want. Just right click on the ribbon and click "customize the ribbon".