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.
Within 5 years (maybe less) a frontier LLM will be capable of completely cloning Excel based on Microsoft's product documentation. And I mean starting from scratch, not using the messy Libreoffice code base.
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.
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.
ebiester · · focus · HN ↗
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
Given the libreoffice codebase is in its dataset, is that really from scratch?
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Kind of hard to write code when you haven't seen a lot of it.
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗