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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

My thought abstraction on this: Joins are what make database technologies... If you can call Excel a database technology... So powerful.

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A decade ago as an intern at Microsoft, I attended a talk by <distinguished engineer whose name I forget> about data systems. The thing I remember from it was: "In terms of total data stored, what data system do you think is the biggest in the world today? ... Probably Excel. Probably Excel by a lot."

Excel has a simple mental model combined with powerful tooling. It's the most beautiful means to get non-technical people to start to think like a programmer. An acquaintance of mine tells a great story of how Excel and VBA got him into software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950736.

This is amazing. I also found a love for programming after i learned some spaghetti VBA to create automated sales reporting at my finance job. Finally starting up CS degree in Jan 2020.

Excel is to me basically a sequel database broken in a few key ways. And some people (a lot of...?) like it that way.

For a lot of individuals and small businesses true databases have a tough learning curve. I commend the Excel developers for recognizing this and including things like Power Query and Power Pivot.

They aren't there to completely replace databases, but they are a decent middle-ground for meeting people where they are.

As an aside, this is the very first time I've ever seen "SQL" written out as "sequel."

Not deliberate; I just write things out as I say them and didn't review.

Excel is an hybrid ball of things already. Reactive dataflow is one of them. So Join is not that much more to add.

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