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I think you are massively underestimating the engineering effort of replacing Excel in large organizations. I don’t think the finance guys can reliably vibe-code an alternative to a massive product that’s at the core of their operations.

Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.

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You don't need to vibe code an alternative to excel, you need to vibe code a solution to the problem you're solving with an excel sheet.

Any nontrivial excel sheet should be a database backed application, the finance guys who build them are in every sense programmers they're just using the wrong tool by convention.

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An agent, sqite, and some html. Are what they want.
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You're missing the point that the users don't want an application. They want to go off on flights of fancy altering the "solution" as they see fit. Excel lets them do whatever crazy thing they want without constraints. Having a database-backed application is exactly what they don't want because they can't be "creative" with it.

I agree with you, BTW, but I've never seen moving Excel sheets to an application work in practice. You can do it, and it just creates more Excel sheets.

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This is in fact several major things:

* Redo UI patterns (for old users): Only matter for on-boarding and compatibility, and probably need to redo the anti-patterns, not necessarily a good idea, or at least must be hold before the next:

* Define a much better internal model than excel has (I bet a mixture of relational, array model as core, then a reactive layer on top), including proper support for correct datatypes (not localized!), dates in all shapes, currency, commodities, unit of measure, etc, tables default as fixed type per column instead of free-form, then we have proper "variant" values, use algebraic types, and so on...

* Then redo the UI

* Define how import/export correctly (so not more non-sense about import based on localized dates, currencies...)

* ... and from legacy formats like Excel

P.D: I explore the idea on https://tablam.org and my goal is eventually marry what excel+access do in one app

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> guaranteeing correctness

So long as you don't have things which aren't dates but which Excel insists totally are. (Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2429759-involuntary-celibacy...)

But yes, cans of worms are many, and Tardis-like they are larger inside than out.

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If organizations can't move off Excel, and outages like this continue to be a problem, then competitors that don't use Excel stand to gain an advantage.

Let the dinosaurs go extinct!

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The majority of finance guys can't even vibe code a markdown editor, let's be honest here.
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Yeah, we wont be one-shotting stuff like this for a least another year or maybe even two! (This is a risky prediction, but I made it.)
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Nobody needs to vibe-code OpenOffice Calc, it has existed for decades and works well.
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Actually importing gene names was possible without having autoconverted names, you had to make sure you were importing files using an import tool, currently listed under the "Data" tab and then importing data from file/web or data, or use the button specific for .csv/txt. In this way, Excel would open gene data in a table editor without renaming gene names if you made sure, this has been possible since at least 2005 I believe, or maybe even earlier. It was critical to not just auto-click or open a .csv or .txt file with Excel, but specifically open a blank or existing workbook and then use the import tool from inside the application. Opening data table files directly with Excel was/is typically bad practice.
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Excel is still the tool in Finance. It is the database, the visualization, the calculation enginer, the collaboration tool, and many other things all rolled into one.
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So your suggestion is to make an Excel clone with AI?
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What other option is there?

Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.

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Python.

Just throw the raw data at the LLM and tell it to do the analysis directly on that, and there's a good chance it will use python and some data science libraries for you.

And if you want, it'll turn it into a web page where people can drag and drop more raw data files on to get updated analytics.

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But then you’re still just using a vibe coded Excel. Maybe you save a little bit on subscription costs, but that’s probably swamped by other costs.
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