> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics.

This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.

I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.

It's interesting how views differ; I have never been able to make decent scientific graphs in Excel while Calc worked fine for me.

I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.

LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.

Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.

Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.

And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.

Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning. About Python vs Excel: Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because:

- it's hard to version control/diff

- it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells

- it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git

In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.

If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.

Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in Excel?

I know plenty of people who think they do. I know a few that cost the world economy about a trillion dollars: https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-spreadsheet-error...

I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.

I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting so it depends what you mean by "serious financial work". The vast majority of folk could probably get by without using Excel I am guessing.

While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.

You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.

This will ruin the formatting randomly. I would not do this if you're working on a deadline.