I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.
Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.
It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.
This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.
Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.
Excel has kept many companies alive that ought to have sunk. It covers for incompetent CIOs and sclerotic management.
Blocking VBA (for security reasons) did wonders for process maturity because it forced funded implementation of programs. Now we have vibeslop we're going the other way.
abtinf · · focus · HN ↗
Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.
It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.
This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.
Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.
angry_octet · · focus · HN ↗
Blocking VBA (for security reasons) did wonders for process maturity because it forced funded implementation of programs. Now we have vibeslop we're going the other way.