> 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...
Essentially you have some maximal resource, i.e. money, and you are trying to figure out how it can be used most effectively under several constraints (don't have to be linear).
I remember distinctly having the calculate them by hand in an A-level math exam in the UK.
stonecharioteer•3h ago
articsputnik•2h ago
epistasis•2h ago
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.
countmora•2h ago
NetMageSCW•1h ago
For any spreadsheet which are updated by refreshing source data such as CSV output from other systems, PowerQuery is what should be used and is very effective.
countmora•2h ago
qsort•1h ago
It suffers from trying to do too many things at once, though. Excel 3 is enough for those use cases without being a complete nightmare for everyone else. Electronic spreadsheets as a concepts are genius, it's the implementation I hate.
fishmicrowaver•1h ago
thewebguyd•57m ago
WHY wouldn't Microsoft just run it in the local interpreter on the machine?
Qem•44m ago
Probably to tighten vendor lock-in.
happytoexplain•1h ago
But using a spreadsheet to store data is completely reasonable. We delude ourselves as technically experienced people when we imply otherwise. When Excel fucks up data (perhaps the most unforgivable sin in all of software) with unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting (i.e. "trying to be clever"), it's absolutely out of touch to point the finger at the end user.
xnx•1h ago
Agree. Soooo many leading zeroes have been striped from ZIP codes.
Equally as bad is no visual indicator to distinguish formula cell from static cells. Easy to silently overwrite formulas with a careless paste.
seemaze•1h ago
Is Python is still a metered cloud runtime?
Qem•46m ago
It's not just that making it a bad product. Those are minor annoyances when compared with it trying to keep your data hostage in opaque formats[1] and exfiltrating your data to the cloud[2].
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...
[2] https://superuser.com/questions/1903431/how-to-stop-excel-36...
ayhanfuat•2h ago
NetMageSCW•1h ago
eimrine•1h ago
NetMageSCW•1h ago
eimrine•36m ago
2. Idk, just asking.
jtbaker•1h ago