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Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that much. Excel is one of the most empowering applications ever written and the single greatest thing Microsoft has ever been involved with.

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Credit where due, spreadsheet applications were already established AND bundled into suites by the time Microsoft got around to leveraging their market position to make Office the de facto standard. But, yeah, I owe most of my career to making real web apps out of badly designed, hard to use, vile to share, yet somehow better than nothing Excel workbooks. Even with all the modern trappings, and besides specific applications like Photoshop or CATIA, you could probably still run a company on just email and Excel, because people will make Excel do whatever they need, no matter how lumbering the monster becomes.

That undersells the innovation of Excel, which started out as a Macintosh exclusive before being ported to Windows.

It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from the ground up. It didn’t need Office bundling (which came much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.

> by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era

Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)

What most techies don't get about Excel is that people wouldn't build their businesses around it if it weren't a really powerful abstraction. Sure, a dev could set up a CRUD app, but then you need a dev, which is far outside the budget of most SMBs. Rather than Excel being the root of all evil, we should view it as the empowerment tool that it really is!

When SPJ of Haskell fame was working for Microsoft, he put together a fantastic presentation on this theme:

https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415929...

It's still a pretty awful tool, and anybody who wondered what the 109 means in `subtotal(109, A:A)` thinks the same.

Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its bad parts.

> I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that much

Yeah, I don't think they really appreciate the Excel pro scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

Mmm, SQL Server and, to a lesser extent, C# would like to have a word.

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