upvote
Is this stuff… like, good? I don’t know anything about the MS ecosystem. If you could start from scratch, would using something more like Python, pandas, that sort of stuff, be viable?
reply
You're not going to get non technical coworkers like the finance department entering their data or reports in pandas. So it depends on how much labor you want to put in helping them do it, I guess?
reply
I thought I read something similar in Levy's book "Hackers" but the following is from https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

"It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was [2]. He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program."

reply
No, none of it is good, excel is basically a bad tool for almost any job. There almost always exist a better thing for everything people use excel for.

But excel has inertia, and it's the only programming non-programmers are able, or rather willing, to do. So we're basically stuck with it.

And yes, I consider crafting and maintaining excel workbooks programming, even if no VBA is involved.

reply
Excel works, the VBA macros with random business rules work, people with business knowledge know how to use it, the workflows are set up.

If we were starting from nothing it wouldn't be built, but the value of what already exists is massive.

reply
I have a client who migrated from Sheets to Excel. Google has all the same issues Microsoft does too when it comes to privacy.
reply