Lots of features, sure, but elegant? I've always felt like excel was about as far as you could get from elegant, especially once you want to do anything more than data entry and simple charts.
Elegant software doesn't normally need an interest group dedicated specifically to preventing people from misusing it. http://www.eusprig.org/
I recently had to do a bunch of currency conversion for my tax accounting. I had hundreds of transactions, and I needed to set the right exchange rate for each transaction, based on the date of the transaction. This took just a couple of minutes to do in Excel. The solution - a simple Excel formula that compared two rows – was indeed, extremely elegant. Excel enables this type of elegant calculating all the time.
I agree. The declarative/functional nature of spreadsheet formulas is certainly elegant, even if you might not say the same about Excel as an application overall. The same could be said about other spreadsheets (e.g Google Sheets).
I'm a definite 'excel-apologist' and think Excel is brilliant and incredibly powerful when used correctly, so the below may be biased but...
> Elegant software doesn't normally need an interest group dedicated specifically to preventing people from misusing it. http://www.eusprig.org/
Plenty of the other software listed has user-error misuses (For instance C is listed, and by the same standard it could be considered responsible for more software vulnerabilities than anything else!).
Sure there are errors in spreadsheets, but as the alternative is often calculating something by hand or asking similarly-trained users to write a python scripts, I think both those options probably create more errors.
Looking at the 'horror stories' listed on that website:
* The first listed is about the UK government using a version of Excel that is over 10 years old, with an issue that would not have happened if they updated the software.
* The third listed is because someone ENTERED incorrect information into a procurement spreadsheet (they copied the specification for a standard bed in rather than a critical care bed).
* The fourth is user input error - they input a fund as Dollars rather than Euros (how is this Excel's fault?)
* The fifth and sixth talk about logic errors - one with hard-coding a value and another with using 'cumulative mileage totals rather than running calculations on a sample average for vehicles'.
I agree that spreadsheets can have issues, but most of these can be mitigated by setting up sheets properly and I haven't really seen a compelling replacement for a spreadsheet for the sorts of stuff it gets used for.
The real problem with spreadsheets is a lack of training - I would estimate less than 20% of users know how to turn on cell validation, less than 10% know how to write a dynamic array formula, and less than 5% know how to use PowerQuery. It's like asking a bunch of people to write python code, but only 10% of users know how to write a loop, and then we are surprised that there are issues.
Besides, if you input a fund into a fancy financial package with the wrong currency it will cause the same issues.
Excel has an unrealistic barrier to performance to meet if we point to the fact that a desktop spreadsheet package is not good at being used for DNA and amino acid analysis.
We don't expect any other off-the-shelf technology to meet such a wide variety of use-cases, and somehow I think the statement 'excel is bad at processing bioinformatics data' speaks a large amount about how pervasive and flexible it is.
Besides, in reality Excel actually can handle the data perfectly fine if the data is brought in correctly (i.e. Data -> Get Data and using PowerQuery rather than just importing a file and hoping Excel works out the types correctly).
If the argument is feature:[something else] ratio, then I might be able to consider it, FSVO something else, such as "UI complexity" or "learning cost". Partly in response to sibling posts, the PP definitely makes me think twice about why I'm willing to call PostgreSQL elegant but pause a bit harder to evaluate Excel.
Yes, I think maybe the original VisiCalc was elegant, even if far less featureful. It was a game-changer, one of the first general purpose PC applications that let users do row/column based computing without programming, and along with word processing was the software that underpinned the explosion of PC use in business.
I taught Lotus 1-2-3 for a while, so probably had well above average familiarity with it.
And then in 1987, I opened Excel 1.0 on a Mac SE for the first time. Was blown away at how elegant that felt. Later versions seemed to loose that original elegance as features were added.
