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Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

If Excel is the Old Way, what’s the current state of the art for GUI software to do these kinds of operations and analysis? Is there an equivalent of the modern ELK stack, but for numerical analysis?

Not everyone can, will, or should have to learn Python.

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Excel is superior to Python in so many ways for many use cases. It is visual (and this already kills the competition. Forget leading three executive through the final m&a python model), you can build small models in seconds or minutes, the learning curve is flatter and hence it reaches more people, auditing is much easier, tiny tweaks can be made much quicker (especially for people who did not setup the model) and it does not require years of studying coding.. i put our interns infront of excel and within 2-3 weeks of hard work they can do their calculations. Impossible for regular business and finance guys if they would have to so this all in python.

Have you used Power BI? I haven’t, and I’m not sure they’re comparable, but at least Microsoft isn’t resting on their laurels when it comes to productivity software for analysis use cases.

Yes, ofc i used power bi. It's great, but it cannot do those things that excel can and vice versa.

They complement each other rather than replace.

Do you think Excel will gain tighter integrations with scripting? I read about Excel getting better scripting support but I forgot what all that entailed and what languages were supported.

Thanks for your perspective, by the way. I don’t use Excel much for higher order stuff, but I want to progress past pivot tables.

Not sure what exactly you mean by scripting support. I used to know a girl who was working in big consultancy, and her team was making sales predictions for huge global brands, in Excel. She was writing some frightening amounts of code in Visual Basic, up to the point when I thought they used Excel just like a fancy IDE for their VB, which was the actual work. Who needs Excel formulas when you have VB, right? It was very philosophical for me to hang out with her sometimes, because we liked to discuss our jobs and all that time she denied when I told her she was a programmer.

Excel on the web has different scripting features and functionality than the desktop version, called Office Scripts, and Power Automate integrations. It also has something called Action Recorder, which seems like a native built-in AutoHotKey type deal.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview...

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