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davidw

Dennis Austin dies at 76.

* Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of Virginia

* Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create PowerPoint

* Forethought acquired by Microsoft

* By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales

* Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes

> Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly aimed at the software and not the people who were using it to make lazy, poor presentations.

> “It’s just like the printing press,” Mr. Austin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”

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Thank you for making a proper slide for this. (Suggestion: Remove "." from slide title.)

Robert Gaskins wrote an interesting book on the development of Powerpoint and the collaboration with Apple and Microsoft.

>thought they were unfairly aimed at the software

Yeah. I’ll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess.

The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is the enormity of the task to disrupt it.

I surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in a very real ways.

For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS

Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives.

Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

Excel rules the roost because it is the GUI to manipulate tabular data.

To be honest: Is there an alternative?

I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".

As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist.

There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual way.

It’s JS rather than Python, but Google Apps Script is quite useful for this, IME.

I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.

Isn't officescript much the same thing?

We successuflly transitioned our finance team from excel to google sheets.

The killer feature was their APIs, where microsoft still sucks.

We could show them that if you put the data in sheets we could mount it from bigquery and process it from there. Or load it from a notebook.

This created a good-enough hybrid solution where spreadsheets could interact with code.

To be clear: I'm not bashing Excel. Agree that there isn't a viable alternative for explorative table manipulation, and the experience of "think/change/see-results" is second to none. I myself use it for low-stakes tasks such as personal budgeting and quick analysis to validate my assumptions on tabular data.

Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.

They just announced this, but it runs python in an azure container - not sure how it hooks into excel unless excel is also running in the cloud, but a lot of people would want to run it locally instead.

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...

> I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".

You might find Mito [https://www.trymito.io/] interesting. I haven’t really used it myself, but it sounds like what you’re looking for.

I’m a very happy (and I believe competent) Apple Numbers user. The only thing I miss from Excel is recursive evaluation (which is necessary for evaluating certain financial models).

At my work (Fortune 100 company), it is Excel and Outlook. I’m not certain why the powers that be settled on outlook.

I worked at a company that used IBM's Lotus for six months. Outlook was no longer the worst for me.

I worked at a place that used Lotus Notes in the late '00s. Used to say that, when Notes launched in 1989, it was 10 years ahead of its time; and even today it's still 10 years ahead of 1989.

As did I. Lotus Notes is something that cannot be unseen.

Outlook is very good when coupled with exchange.

Microsoft are doing their best to alienate their established userbase however, the next versions are just going to be the garbage webmail version wrapped as an app.

Can you add your own styles to Google docs? Does it have support for templates yet?

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