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Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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