Excel

It depends on how long you use it:
Year 1: Ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?
Year 2: How is it still fucking breaking?
Year 3: I just don't fucking care why it keeps breaking. I think I hate this program.
Year 4: I hate this program
Year 5: Let the hate flow through you, consume you. Feel the dark side flowing through your fingertips. Yes. Good. Why is it breaking? It's the end users. Yes... they've been plotting against you from the beginning - hiding columns, erasing formulas and even...
merging cells
Que heavy breathing through a respirator.
Year 6: It's a board meeting. They ask you if you can average all the moving averages of average sales per month and provide an exponential trendline to forecast growth on five million rows of data.
You say "sure, boss, I can knock that for you in Excel in about an hour or two."
Your team leader interjects "I believe what he was trying to say was we'll use Tableau and it will take about a month."
You turn to him with a steely glare.
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
Year 7: Your team leader is gone after you pointed out he fucked up one of your sheets that run the business by merging a cell. All data flows through you and the holy spreadsheet, and the board is terrified of firing you because no one knows how your sheets work but you and their entire inventory system would collapse if you leave.
But then the inevitable happens. Dissension in the ranks. The juniors talk of python, R, Tableau, Power BI - anything to release your dark hold upon the holy data. You could crush them all with a xlookup chain faster than they can type a SELECT statement. The Rebellion is coming, but you're ready. You've discovered the Data Model, capable of building a relational database behind the hidden moons of Power Pivot, parsing tens of millions of rows - and your Death Star is almost complete.
You're ready to unleash your dark fury when the fucking spreadsheet breaks again.
Year 8: New company. They ask if you know Excel. You just start cackling with a addictive gleam in your eye as tears start streaming down your face.
They hire you on the spot.
All they use is Excel. And Access.
You think, ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?
- We need a /c/MuseumOfLemmy to preserve this treasure in so that it may be cherished and studied by our children and our children’s children and many generations beyond.
- !LemmySilverBot@lemmy.world
- This is art
- Year 7: Your team leader is gone after you pointed out he fucked up one of your sheets that run the business by merging a cell.
  I am laughing about how after 7 years nobody has locked the sheets that run the business to avoid this specific thing.
  Or maybe they were kocked and the team leader unlocked it so they could break it without saving a backup.
- Why isn't that "Merge Cells" button hidden behind 3 levels of menus up to this day?
- There's no way they're using xlookup at year 7. You can pry my index match from my cold dead hands.
  
  Xlookup works fine for like 90% of cases, I save index match mainly for when I need to return multiple lookup values. In which case I load into BI because I always forget how index match works 😫
  
  cackles manically in DAX
- 🏅
- Damn you just described my role but everything happened within a span of 3 years
- The ending was great. Nice payoff.
- This comment should be UNESCO world heritage
- Damn as somebody with very little coding or IT background whatsoever but had to learn excel on my last 5 year of work, I understood it all.
  Especially the cell merging... Spawn of the devil itself...
  Still power query is quite addictive, the main reason why moving to OpenOffice is hard.
- !LemmySilver
- *cue
- Just started a new job two weeks ago, all they use is Excel and Access. Now you've got me scared, first job out of uni and feels like a lot of pressure.
  
  Welcome to the dark side, young padawan...
- I guess I’m just about at the end. How the fuck do I use access?

I've done things in excel that are an abomination in the eyes of the divine.
I have absolutely 0 regret.
- You have January 1, 1970 regret?
  
  Or false regret, either or.
- Generate localization strings in all requested languages with the "translate" macro without proof checking because you don't speak Finnish or Japanese?
  
  Worse - pulling data from a web page, then using the power of pure jank to parse this input, and then invoking a sheet of reference string builders to construct formulae and execute them using too damn many @indirects nested into vlookups before finally adding in date aware data reveals, because no excel abomination is complete without trying to parse dates.
- i once used an excel sheet to emulated a von Newman architecture ALU+RAM
  fun and useless, but very (un)efficient way to calculate Fibonacci numbers

Excel is a hammer.
When holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Stop using Excel for anything more than simple data extraction and pivot tables, get a custom solution tailored to your needs rather than a monstrous Excel document that consumes 14 GB of RAM to run.
- We support a financial institution that uses ~30MB Excel sheets with thousands of calculations and they wonder why they can't send it via email or why it has issues when 10 people edit it at once
  Just use a goddamn database
  
  MyExcelDB powers thousands of institutions daily
- The bad thing is, they've attached a mediocre screwdriver to the hammer because everybody keeps using the hammer as a screwdriver. But now, everybody STILL uses the hammer as a screwdriver. The screwdriver part used to be a separate tool, but people didn't know how to use it, and now they still don't, even though it comes with instructions.
  They really should have kept things separate.
- Got it.
  use it as calculator
  
  It really Excels at being a Calc!
- Never!
  ::: spoiler Spoiler YouTube link: Stand-up Maths - Stand-up comedy routine about Spreadsheets

"It's not as good as making games in as Unity or Unreal but I can manage."
- Our future is that one day our heads will be attached to VR headsets and our brains uploaded and parsed in 1.9 TiB of MS Excel.

When I did first line IT support I really loved how it stopped automatically calculating formulas for everyone in HR at the same time

"Excel" 365 🤮

What if I like it? Is there something wrong with me?
- Not at all. You just haven't gotten deep enough into the beast to see the horror.
  
  But what about those of us in R1C1 mode using lambdas to do recursive cell operations across data pulled from multiple sheets? Am I anywhere near the kinda of Eldritch horrors discussed? I've also written indirect references based on Sheet name to populate filters from web scraped tables. I just don't know how deep the pit goes at this point.
- You are probably using it for its intended purpose, which it Excels at.
- I think it's one of my all time favorites. I think people here live in the tech literate bubble who know how to use specialized software for the different things excel does, albeit clunkily. But average people are intimidated by those more advanced tools, and there are a lot of average people in decision making positions who benefit greatly from being able to use excel.
- You will understand in time, young padawan...

The Libre Office Suite is better, and Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
- Libreoffice calc is pretty hurrendous tbh
  
  It's ok if you use it for simple things. Simple arithmetic
  
  Yeah, I prefer Grist
- Create a table in Libre Office, I'll wait...
  (Hint,the devs have flat out stated they will never add tables to Calc, as it's wrong to do).
  99% of Excel usage includes a table in the first, or second, sheet. Without tables a spreadsheet app is useless, in my opinion, regardless of how "wrong" it is (and I agree that it's wrong).
  
  Wait excel sheets are pretty much already tables right...
  
  Everything is a table if you're brave enough.
- It’s been a while since I’ve used it, how good is it compared to office and Google sheets now?
  
  Similar but with an interface that refuses to do anything new for 20 years.
- No PowerQuery? No thank you.

ooh thats me and databases.
- Databases are just Excel with extra steps
  
  Databases are excel in four dimensions.
  
  NHS COVID DATA entered the chat

I did a GCSE course on Excel, I learned to get irrationally angry every time a class was scheduled
- My brain didn't see GCSE at first, instead it saw CSGO and was both confused and intrigued.
  
  real footage of me in my Excel class ^

I have been using Grist a lot and it has been working quite well. I don't like Python that much, but it's a lot better than the functions in Excell.

I guess you really...excel at it!

I got a job recently and they asked me if I know excel. I said yes, but I dont even know how to use formulas
Pray for me 😭
- Excel is one of the few things copilot has actually been able to help me with. Apparantly microsofts shitty programs understand each other.
  
  Interesting. I will be using that information mwahahaha >:)
  
  It's a niche where AI helps because there's just decades of so many forums and videos full of how to do stuff in excel and with AI you get the right answer quicker with less noise around it. I use ai assistance for excel formulas all the time, works pretty good for that.
- Just learn, how hard can it be? Ask AI to help as the other poster suggested.