I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death
Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked
Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it’s being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it
More commonly, I’ve had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It’s just hell.
Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.
You use what ya got, and you don’t buy database software or hire a database guy until you know you need one
But access comes with office, so if you have excel you have at least a software that is intended to be used as a DB (efficacy aside)
Probably true for most companies but I worked at one that had plenty of DB servers and developers, even developed their own database tech. Still, Excelitis as we called it was rampant.
Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.
If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.
Wait who are the technical people you work with who are using things besides Excel?? Or by technical people do you specifically mean computer science people? Cause you get mech, civil, or electrical engineers in a room and I think I would have a heart attack if their designs were not all in Excel or word (+altium, solidkindaworks, etc)
Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand… And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.
It’s criminal that Microsoft has such a monopoly on word processing, they can’t even render text properly. It’s not an issue in Mac or Linux, but it is in all windows applications that aren’t using a chromium base.
Employer: Print out this .doc and bring it to work. Me, with a Mac: alright, here you go. Employer: why did you print it like this? Me: that’s what you sent me.
Uses compute platform that’s spent (all of personal computer history) trying to exclude any outsiders from working with them, a design intention of Steve Jobs from day one leading to significant waste and suffering for the past 50 years.
Sad that Microsoft doesn’t care
At least Linux has a leg to stand on. The culture can be exhausting but is generally in the right.
I feel you on that first part, I always use Markdown nowadays when I don’t have to use Word (or LibreOffice Writer in my case), I even use Marp to make presentations with Markdown. Since there’s no dragging stuff around and eyeballing if it’s actually coherent, it’s much quicker, the layout is always perfect and changing the layout doesn’t fuck up the entire slide/document.
It…was intended for those things. Excel is modern business’ multi-tool. You’re not going to excise it until there is a solution for the HR person to do basic bulk data processing, basic Excel programming without having to acknowledge they are doing programming, etc.
The other path is better spreadsheet software, but let’s be honest most of the others are poor clones. Gsheets are nearly useless, only office is solid but…well, it’s just Excel but free. Open office is Excel millennium edition and libre while better than open, and has a few nice quality of life improvements, it’s still Excel.
