Every single attempt to migrate to something else has been a comical failure. On the plus side they tend to be rapid failures rather than SAP style multi years
All those migration projects tend to fail on the details, there is always that one customisation point that is easily done in Excel, but requires a whole team with architects and such for getting the same capability on the replacement tool.
LibreOffice and Google Sheets are still quite far from everything that Excel is capabale of.
I was part of a project to replace Excel, on a lifesciences department that was using it, as you might think about R, Pandas and similar.
Tableau was even a more appealing candidate to them.
There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet: the user can start with very literal actions on data, and slowly introduce abstractions like formulae. In conventional programming, the programmer has nothing but abstractions with which to work.
It's reminiscent of one of Fred Brooks' remarks about how showing the data structures makes the algorithms obvious, but showing the algorithms reveals little about the data structures.
Note all the audio programming tools getting embraced by music folks as well, it is coding, but made approachable.
I hate Microsoft but love Excel. I was hoping python in excel would be this but I don't think it quite is.
There is no replacement for visualizing the data and intermediates. You have to see what is going on, it's the only way to catch bugs and issues and make good performance improvements.
Like actually looking at the gradients and weights and activations and predictions and stuff often shows you that something janky is going on, its great for adjusting architectures. Looking into specific high loss test samples and mispredictioms and stuff will show you that there are problems with your data or normalization and whatnot.
The issue is that there are basically an infinite number of intermediates you could potentially look at. So ignoring almost all of them is the only thing that scales and you have to be extremely deliberate.
I even have done this first day's advent of code, and the first part of day two, in a Google sheet. Formulas only, so no scripting needed.
I worked at a place that used Google Workspace and the most effective people simply supplied their own Excel, because it's just way more efficient than spending hours learning how to use Google's clunky pivot table function, when you already know how to do it well with Microsoft.
Yes, it's awful in many ways, but it is very accessible to people who don't consider themselves programmers. "I just want to do my thing" is very easily done in a mashup of the spreadsheet and VBA.
We also forget the pain of learning a new technology. People whose first experience is excel also go through this. Shit doesn't do what you wanted. After a while, they can build stuff in excel, but they don't want to learn python, because there's more pain coming.
Most senior devs have transcended particular languages or technologies, so they don't see it. They pay a very small cost for picking up a new tool, so they scratch their heads when they see a guy who wants to run a trading book on a spreadsheet.
The fact that all these tools eventually fall apart at scale is basically irrelevant. You can only take away control from their cold, dead hands, and they will never learn the programming skills to build something more scalable themselves. All solutions almost invariably trend towards shifting scaling problems away from the desired frontend that keeps control (or at least the illusion of control) in the hands of business stakeholders (one of the reasons why companies love building all manner of integrations on top of Jira).
And let's be clear, it's not like the alternatives here (i.e. databases) are so easy. Finance folk are used to creating new spreadsheets on their local computer for free and at will; most databases require setting up a server, DNS, certificates, firewalls, most of which have real costs. SQLite naively sounds like a reasonable approach, but by default a table is limited to 2,000 columns while an Excel spreadsheet is by default limited to about 16,000 columns, and yes, stuff like this really matters when you're talking about trying to uproot a favored tool. At the end of the day, most of Excel's limitations are due to attempting to cram a spreadsheet into a single file (same as SQLite); if Microsoft were smart, they'd offer a cloud-only "spreadsheet" (really a database over a full filesystem, or maybe over object storage) without the limitations of ordinary Excel spreadsheets, where Excel-the-desktop-app only downloads to the local client the relevant cells that are actually in view, while adding more options to mirror/load data from external sources into other sheets attached to the same cloud-only "spreadsheet".
I have seen it used for everything from configuring aircraft for sale to quoting bond prices for voice traders.
There's even that famous Japanese artist who uses it for painting.
It's sort of like the OG normies Jupyter notebook.
erikgahner•57m ago