Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people? Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.

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whatever1 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.

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somat 2 days ago | parent [-]

We suck at excel because we recognize that it has a bad data model and avoid it. So when we want to calculate something we pick something with better structure. something more pleasant to use than the spreadsheets "it's a big bag of cells" approach.

Really, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now that I have better tools I don't enjoy doing work in them anymore.

	▲	andyferris 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I feel it's the extreme of "static vs dynamic languages". In Excel, even variables (cells) are dynamic, not fixed names in a lexical scope. The reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically. I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).

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leoc 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is even a successful competitive scene: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/06/experie... https://excel-esports.com/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xw9w976jo