this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Trippin' Through Time

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago

Anyone who works FinTech knows that's it's these Mainframes and HPNS systems running on code written in Latin maintained by guys working past retirement that are the frayed rope holding the debit and credit transaction system together.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

You can't swap Excel with anything else. Are you going to trust that millions of man-hours of work will translate perfectly? Going to take that risk with your company?

Even if you started your business with another spreadsheet, you still have to use Excel sheets from others.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because you don't even dare breathe on load-bearing legacy systems. You want to change the whole app, you insolent heretic?!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

The more important a system is, the more the engineers involved need to be used to changing the system.

Of course, no engineering is really involved in excel-based legacy systems, which is a large part of why they are as dangerous as they are.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

three reasons:

  1. power query
  2. keyboard shortcuts
  3. pioneer for new functions (e.g., xlookup, dot-colon, let, etc)

oh, and excel doesn't crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

oh, and excel doesn’t crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.

then you aren't running anything past Excel 2016

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Of course not, we're talking about Enterprise here. Newer versions of Excel won't run on Windows XP.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Libre office is significantly more stable for me than office365 on a win11 machine running on hardware from 2023. It just always works and quickly.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Libreoffice calc sucks sorry. Onlyoffice might be a good substitute.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sadly, Excel is still the gold standard. There are plenty of competing options for creating basic spreadsheets but once you start trying to do any sort of complex data analysis, the capabilities gap starts to widen very quickly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

You know, excel still kind of sucks. It kept freezing or crashing on me when I had to process 10k+ rows. Switched to awk instead.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I kinda curious since I've been using it for my meager spreadsheet use for over ten years.

What sucks about it to you?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

It feels like a less useful Office 97 variant.

With modern UI/UX, it’s just clunky and old. Like, Google spreadsheets is works… better. Some things that I do in excel can’t really transfer over that easily (don’t have any examples off the top of my head sorry)

The PowerPoint variant is the WORST offense though.

It’s like having to maintain two different skillsets that are 85% similar.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I don't remember specific examples but the answer is formulas. Google Sheets lacks a lot of the "advanced" non-math formulas.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Okay. I solved that by not using office at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That would be a great solution but IT gives me no choice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I have to install it here and there but I don't have to show people how it works.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So is it just the UI or the actual functionality? I know the deep deep functionality probably isn't there but I want to know how deep you have to go.

You can also change the UI to have the ribbon. It doesn't do it by default because I think they're worried about legality.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Both.

If I get deep enough, there are excel functions that are missing. On a surface level, UI.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Can’t remember off the top of my head. It was a couple years ago. Maybe the one to calculate mortgage?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As someone who works in a Fortune 100 company, the number of spreadsheets we have for the vast majority of our tasks...

The biggest issue I've seen is how do you get a bunch of data to look and behave between a bunch of users who have different skillsets and varying knowledge about how the data connects to other data?

You could build a web page with a database backend. But this takes hours when plopping the data into a spreadsheet is minutes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Accountants are learning python to parse spreadsheets now

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Interesting reading. I'm an actuarie in an insurance company and everything I do is in python, is easy to maintain because I'm a "solo developer" building custom tools for me and my team (with pyinstall to create GUIs of the programs so they can used them), but my internal libraries have started to grow up.

About the comments the author had about pandas, I just started to move away from it to polars because the databases I'm working now have easy 50M+ rows, and as they say came for the speed stay for the syntax. I'm debating myself if make my intern learn pandas first, or just go for polars from the begging.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Just gonna drop this here: http://visidata.org/

Blows excel out of the water, at least for tabular data (which, frankly, is what all financial data should be... Cell-based formulas are a mistake).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How's LibreOffice at pivot tables nowadays?

Follow-up question, how's LibreOffice at telling my tech illiterate boss she has to go to IT to get admin rights to install LO so she can open the file I just sent her because I don't morally want to support Microsoft?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

MS Office can open LO documents.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I 100% believe if some scripting language like Python was taught in schools instead of excel we would be in a MUCH better place. I have to deal with user created excel contraptions everyday at my work and they make me want to cry

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

A few years back, someone at corporate made an Excel based "program" for planning our trade shows. It was the most rage inducing rickety ass bullshit contraption I have ever had to deal with. It was basically a data entry wizard GUI for a spreadsheet. But it would crash every 2-3 entries, and lose all the data that had been added since the last save. The only way to save the data involved closing it and restarting it. So I had to close/reopen after every entry just to keep from having to risk redoing it all multiple times.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My only complaint is the blinding white cells. There's a reason why like every other major program uses dark mode.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Excel doesn't have dark mode? That's literally incredible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Not by default, and if you use it all the formatting (cell colors, borders, etc) doesn't work well anymore. Done up sheets with good formatting are unreadable, unless you're already very familiar with them.

I used to change the blinding white to a light grey, but it doesn't jive with the border colors and on large sheets it adds to the file size quite substantially.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Hahaha Haha Hahaha Haha Hahaha Haha... /Sigh

Ffs.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

It's the keyboard shortcuts. Might as well try to get people to learn Uzbek

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

i do all my finances in a physical ledger labeled 'never show to the IRS'

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

For those who can't bother to look it up https://www.xkcd.com/2347/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Watch Microsoft ruin another good thing!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of good answers, but my bet is the third party plug-ins. Does librecalc have SAP Analysis, or the other plug-ins to connect excel to the accounting systems?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

SAP is some kind of communicable brain cancer. My company (has factories in over a dozen countries) has been trying to implement it for almost 10 years now. A 5 min job now takes 30min because of all the paperwork that has to go along with it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

SAP stands for Slow Arduous Process.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Huh. I don't know about the financial system but I'm guessing a good chunk of it is ran by some old mainframes.

It's like the retail industry, still massively relying on IBM i/iSeries/AS400. I worked for a consulting company that was doing a little bit of admin and support work for companies still using this system and the list is still very long. At least it still receives updates, and it's kind of fun/odd to work with if you like CLI, but it's super expensive and absolutely proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Anybody who knows what LibreOffice is already knows what those ugly hack Excel spreadsheets should have been in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

You want us to use access? No one wants to use access I'll just make a hyperlink to another book on the last cell

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Two things: VBA and the autosum formula keyboard shortcut.

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