this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Genuinely what do you need in excel you can’t do anywhere else? For me sheets are just glorified visual data storage. If I need to do complex stuff I can probably do it faster in polars or pandas than I can in excel
It's massive in business environments. It is the lingua franca of business analysis (both back of the napkin analysis, proof of concept and more complicated/involved projects).
It is most definitely not used merely as "glorified visual data storage".
There are probably a lot of programms that do aspects of Excel better. But the combined might you weild if you know how to use Excel is very powerful. I tried LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and the spreadsheet part of those office suites is the roughest one until today.
But my comment was more about how much of our economy probably runs on Excel. And I experienced how badly Excel and for example LibreOffice Calc plays together, it makes switching very hard. A complex .xlsx is far from being rendered and calculated correctly in LibreOffice.
Yeah that’s fair. Many many many of my coworkers heavily rely on excel so I can understand this. I just really don’t like using it personally. It’s like vscode too much stuff thrown at me at once when I don’t need like 99%. Just let me write a script
Power Query
I raise you a quick SQL query. Admittedly I’m a data engineer but I hate graphical tools that abstract code away from me.
That's wonderful you are a data engineer, but in a normal business setting most people are not. I'm the only one at my company who knows SQL exists. But everyone knows what Excel is, everyone knows at least the basics of using it. Even if I got my coworkers familiar with and writing SQL (which is a laughable thought) there are still clients.
Data is everywhere, and Excel has been the default program for light data analysis for decades. I hate it as much as the next person, but right now it's inescapable and irreplaceable.
Excel/Access is literally the only reason I ever boot to Windows anymore.
Is Onlyoffice enough for you?