There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.

> The enduring power of pivot tables is their robustness, simple usage, and fast, interactive response. It's the Lingua Franca of data if you are not fluent in the language of SQL or Python. A common language everyone understands: the top management, domain experts, and developers. It's an interface to data; it's the first no-code interface. Instead of the multidimensional query language MDX or the newer DAX, people can use a simple drag-and-drop interface. It democratized data analysis.

It seems like the page updates the page url every time you scroll to a new section, which means you end up with 10+ history entries for the page if you scroll all the way through. To exit out of the page you'd have to click back 10+ times to go through those history entries. Google maps does something similar, where it adds a new entry to history every time you pan, which means your history is polluted with entries for google maps.

Microsoft copied the basic concept from Lotus, and Borland also copied it etc...

The pivot table, the spreadsheet's most powerful tool (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820877 - Oct 2023 (192 comments)