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Comment by Pyxl101 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but I will choose to take your words literally because Excel has had an enormous productivity impact on the people who used it, and in many areas changed how business was done by introducing programming and automation (formulas, pivot tables, graphs etc.) to technical business users.

Edit: glad you were not being sarcastic :-) thanks for clarifying

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I was not being sarcastic. As a person who builds statistical models of credit risk for a living, I truly consider Excel to be one of the finest software ever made. I generally consider it true for a lot of Microsoft products, though most people in this forum tend to disagree.

Microsoft Excel has stopped working.

'Please hit F9 to re-run Monte Carlo CVA Pricer.'

From what I've seen, the the spreadsheets themselves are great, but the lack of good version control, revision tracking, and regression testing makes for poor operational processes.

People e-mail one another Excel workbooks, there's 5 different versions in flight at once, and impossible to find when an error or mistake got introduced or who was responsible.

Should Excel get all the credit, as it wasn't the first spreadsheet

Computerised spreadsheets were inevitable, we've been using spreadsheets in some form for thousands of years. Visicalc is recognised as being the first, but Excel has been the dominant product for decades now, for all its warts it has had a massive impact on humanity.

Excel was a copy of Lotus123. Once they killed it, by cheating, they took it a long way further though.

Is there any evidence of that? This page seems to think otherwise:

http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

Not the OP, but I think you misunderstood. Excel was always a windows application that had the same functionality as lotus 123 that was a DOS application. So much so that the keyboard interface is still compatible.

Actually what I remember is that Lotus killed itself by not having a windows version on time.

I'm just curious what OP meant by 'cheating', if not that.

> Lotus killed itself by not having a windows version on time.

They actually believed when Microsoft said OS/2 was the future. That probably killed some of their competitors.

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