Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.

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lysace a day ago | parent [-]

Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).

This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.

Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.

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eszed a day ago | parent | next [-]

Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.

Let alone the date issues.

At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.

	▲	lysace a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.

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ciupicri a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From 2020: "Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)

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lysace a day ago | parent [-]

Exactly. They couldn't really change it even if they wanted to. The implementation with all of its warts and quirks is now the standard.

	▲	jsmith99 a day ago \| parent [-]
		They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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NetMageSCW 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Excel has had huge changes that made it much more powerful a lot more recently than that.

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mmooss a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).

What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?

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chungy 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The entire Microsoft Office suite pretty much had every feature that users need by 1997. It's just been UI refreshes ever since.

	▲	NetMageSCW 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wrong.

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emeril a day ago | parent | prev [-]

def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since

I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO

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lysace a day ago | parent [-]

*2003, probably?

	▲	KellyCriterion 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		not OP, but yes - the limit was raised long time ago