This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures.
If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it.
One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.
As other commenters explained, Excel is universal. Excel is the global manifestation of God on Earth. Excel is the final avatar. If Pythagoras were alive now, he would get Excel in an instant.
I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.
I wrote a VB macro that displays the formula for a cell, next to the cell. Granted you have to add a cell (typically a column) to make space for it. It returns either a formula, or "constant" if the cell doesn't contain a formula. I could make it more sophisticated, but just those two things are enough to make spreadsheets a lot easier for me to follow.
Following spreadsheets is like trying to find something in my garage if all of the boxes have lids. But if the boxes are all open, I can find stuff in a jiffy, even if the boxes are disorganized.
The closed toolbox is a nice analogy for opening a sheet full of numbers. A foreign Excel sheet can take a lot of clicking around to get an idea of how it works sometimes.
Excel sheets are built visually so there is absolutely no sane way to parse them. Just the same thing as trying to restructure a pdf at the end of the day.
They’ve removed that limitation now, I think. That said, I still haven’t found any use-case for Copilot within an Excel workbook that works (probably because I’ve only ever asked it to do very difficult things since I don’t need it for easy stuff). So there’s that.
Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.
I think it's important to think of Excel as a tool for modelling reality and not a tool for changing it. IMO Excel should not be producing data feeds that other tools expect real time access to, nor should it make API calls that mutate state on other platforms.
> One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
This! I love Cursor’s IDE but, boy, does it really sh*t me off everytime I update it and they remove the keybinding for CMD + SHFT + L.
Like, seriously, you couldn’t chose a different combination for your added feature’s shortcut!?
It’s not like the ‘find all instances of’ shortcut is some hidden, unused gem, which you have to tickle the Gruffalo in order to access! It’s one of the most important shortcuts!
Well it might be replaced by another spreadsheet. Maybe one that does actual innovation. I don't think people in the 80s ever thought that Lotus 1-2-3 would go away.
If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it.
One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.