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Comment by dandermotj | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely the interface to excel that causes errors. I can take your excel spreadsheet, format cells, add things, change a reference and generally fuck it up and hand it back to you and you would never know. Whereas, if I change a text file then you can see what's changed. Similar errors are much less common in a programming language.d

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You can write tests for an excel spreadsheet if that is your thing. In fact Excel can be driven and automated by any .NET language. It is quite extensible. But most people don't do that because they are not developers and the word "unit test" is not part of their routine.

Which is why they will not be switching to python or R any time soon and even if they do, it will still have similar issues as the Excel version.

Just because you know how to use git history, diffs, etc.. to spot differences in code doesn't mean that is going to help the layperson.

When you're working with people who are good with Excel, they will notice. If you're only ok with excel and just use vlookups, then you're probably going to have problems, especially since those people don't tend to keep a versioned history of their files. Really the main difference is that version control has become an ingrained habit in software development whereas with Excel it's rare

Ah, a True Scotsman is good at Excel. I understand now.

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