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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977·

The selling point of Excel is not the feature set, it's that people know Excel and are usually very resistant to learning something new.

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As someone who’s compared spreadsheet feature sets, though: it’s also very much the feature set.

Well, in a way it is of course, because if your reference is Excel, then you want the feature set of Excel.

Or what specifically do you mean?

Sheets and Numbers are spreadsheets. Excel is an application platform and programming language that’s convinced people it’s just a spreadsheet.

VBA, PowerQuery, structured references, the newer formulae like XLOOKUP, dynamic array-spill formulae, map/filter/reduce/lambda, various obscure financial stuff.

Sheets and Calc don't have these.

The problem is that it encourages people to use excel for things that should never be in a spreadsheet in the first place. I mean if you're reaching for VBA, building complex PowerQuery pipelines, and writing nested LAMBDA functions just to process your data, imho you have outgrown excel. Just because you can build an entire solution in Excel because you already know the interface, doesn't mean you should...

Also, don't get me started on the newer functions such as XLOOKUP and Dynamic... Relational data belongs in a relational database. If you are joining tables and filtering massive arrays, you should be using standard SQL Arrays, it makes it so much easier to troubleshoot long term.

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