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Comment by dereg | Hacker News Reader

You're right about Excel. It is the corporate behemoth that may never be slayed.

I'm thinking of getting a Mac, but can the Mac version of Excel do keyboard shortcuts like on Windows? (E.g. "alt, o, h, r" to rename a sheet, or "alt, i, w" to insert a sheet). From my experience, it doesn't. Losing shortcuts would put a heavy drag on my productivity.

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It's interesting, because Visicalc was originally dominant. And then Lotus 1-2-3 was dominant. And now Excel is. Each could read the format of the previous one, but improved features/performance. The switchover appears to be related to platform changing, to IBM-PC, to GUIs. Which is how it usually goes. One would expect an Excel-slayer to emerge from a platform that replaces Windows - such as the web or the iPad (or some new GPU/many-core architecture that gives us speed equivalent to extrapolated clock rate increases if they hadn't stopped at 3GHz about 10 years ago), if it somehow invades the enterprise. i.e. a Windows-slayer.

http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#History

No - Mac Excel cannot do the old Windows shortcuts. It was the reason I held out for years, but once the useless ribbon turned up on Windows the shortcuts became a sloppy reverse compatibility addition. When Visual Basic arrived back on the Mac there was no reason to keep windows excel.

Excel is 99% of the reason I run virtualized windows.

Excel's basic math errors are 99% of the reason I do my stats with python.

Best of both(ish) worlds: use python in LibreOffice.

Care to elaborate?

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25...

That's not a math error, that's a display error. I'm no fan of Office, but that would not be a reason to fear Excel's ability to calculate correctly.

During the whole OOXML debacle, there were many examples discovered of ambiguous or flat-out wrong behavior in various versions of Excel over the years, the kind of wrong behavior that could easily have altered the outcome of financial transactions that were managed using spreadsheets. You can probably find some if you hunt for them on Groklaw. I seem to remember one related to a date basis parameter, so that might be a good first keyword set to try.

Rob Weir has pointed out a lot of OOXML-problems over the years: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/fractured-yearfrac-and-d...

Excel only adds up to about 6 decimals. I worked on a project of an Endowment Fund (billions) and Excel was flat out wrong when computing billions over decades.

The worst part is: Excel is the Dogma. If your results do not match with Excel, make it.

1 + 1 = 3

Not a maths error, only a display error.

I was guessing that's what pstephens was referring to, but he hasn't elaborated.

I'm not sure what you do with Excel, but another major downside for the Mac version is it doesn't have statistical analysis like its Windows counterpart does.

Not a big issue unless you're doing psychological research or work in finance.

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