Yeah well… someone who’s never used Excel in earnest sounding off about Microsoft is the lol thing.
There are tools that will outperform it or offer greater depth of functionality in specific areas but as a good all-round tool it’s hard to beat.
Back in the late 80’s I wrote a program in Excel macros (pre-VBA) to re-format csv files with data for a hospital catalogue so that it would import into a page layout app (Quark) with the correct style for each line, with manual intervention only needed for pagination, that took 2 weeks off production time.
This! Literally everything about it appears almost calculated to frustrate and enrage. I sometimes think they did it deliberately as a filter to identify the most susceptible Apple partisans. Heavy itunes user = they’ll buy anything with an apple on it.
The genius of Excel is that they managed to make the experience of using it exactly painful enough that people are able, barely, to get things done, but the process of getting there is so difficult that users develop an irrational Stockholm Syndrome attachment to the program in an effort to give their suffering some kind of meaning. “Do you want to write a complex computer program, but in a way that’s impossible to test, debug, maintain or explain to someone else, using an IDE that’s significantly less powerful than Notepad? You’re in luck…”
