Thus ending our long national nightmare of accidentally opening things in WordPad on a fresh install.

  • flatbield
    link
    fedilink
    English
    51 year ago

    I guess I am from the old days. For me MSO has had nothing in terms of needed improvements since about 1998. And thankfully I moved to Libreoffice before the ribbon bar and all the VBA issues with 2013. Libreoffice became usable about 2005. Yes it was Excel for me that was the last to go. Solver in particular. As far as VBA, I switched from that to python about 1998.

    As far as dated. I think it depends on who you think defines the standard . For me that is not MS.

    • @am0@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      51 year ago

      As a user of advanced excel features like Power Query and even its plethora of built in functions, LibreOffice Calc just doesn’t hold up at all. It lacks all beyond the most basic table features

      • flatbield
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        That is the thing. I would not do anything advanced in a spread sheet. Just not productive. I would use Python.

        • @am0@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          2
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          As an example, I made a spreadsheet that queried WoW’s auction house API and showed me items, their crafting components, prices and profits from crafting, that was then easily interactable and extendable in the GUI. Doing the same thing in python would have been great up until the point where I want to display the information… getting python to output a proper front end GUI is definitely a more time consuming exercise than using Excel’s built in functionality

          • flatbield
            link
            fedilink
            English
            3
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Keep in mind Python can interact with spreadsheet formats. So it is very possible to input your data in a spreadsheet , load that data into Python, then dump it into a spreadsheet. Easiest is CSV but I have done direct too.

            What approach depends. If you know a spreadsheet really well, then taking it quite a ways makes a lot of sense. On the other hand when one gets to the point of writing more then 100 lines of VBA and especially into the 500 range, it may be time to use another approach. Same when execution times are very long or data very large. Working with large VBA code bases is kind of nutty but people often get too deep into the I have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail thinking. I have had to work with code like that myself.