Microsoft Excel, what a beautiful beautiful tool. Absolutely wonderful and insanely powerful.

But it annoys the fuck out of me whenever I see a poorly formated sheet.

How fucking difficult it is to format few cells and be consistent with it?!!

Presentation does matter and if you cannot format a single spreadsheet, I am judging you for sure.

On the other hand, a well formatted email/excel or anything, is a huge turn on.

Aesthetically pleasing things are good (which don't serve any underlying functional purpose).

Absolutely agree.

Best when the Excel sheet looks like a unicorn had diarrhea - too many colors in too many shades, for no reason

@IntrusionCM I call it Rangoli or Mandala. Lmao

If you don't know what that is, let me know..

I could've sworn that the first paragraph was 100% sarcasm

@electrineer I think many people underestimate what Excel can _actually_ do.

Eg. Import of JSON, transformation / drill down, be done.

The stench and usability of (Visual-) Basic is certainly not nice, but JSON / drilldown is a feature I prefer not to miss.

Parsing JSON via e.g. Python, creating an Excel sheet with diagrams / formatting etc., outputting and assuring it stays bug free is _way_ more complicated, sadly.

@IntrusionCM hmmm, trying hard not to disagree, but depending on the json complexity, pandas makes that part super easy. Read json (whatever way) into python, create dataframe from dict and smush it around how you want and then for display options df.to_excel. I have given up years of doing excel formulas and custom macros in favor of pandas, but I still use excel charts.

@electrineer @atrabilious @IntrusionCM well Excel's primary audience is non-devs or if I can put it as business users.

@Floydimus yeah, but we went off the rails when json was thrown out. Nerds gonna nerd.

My excel rants are always about building a process around a damn excel.(worst thing ever, mind you) and then operations goes “oh we had a contract around format?” Yeah, we’re not doing that and it needs to work anyway. Variable input automation makes me want to punch screens.

Spreadsheets are imperative by design. The main thing is to keep values in their according columns and rows.

If they send me a properly structured database, I'll forward them my blessings.

Excel is one of the most popular databases. Oo

The truth is that it is one of the best tools that one can use when working because they facilitate everything and for everything.

@atrabilious Yeah. When it's just that, you're absolutely right .

My use case is that I have an gatherer and aggregator script that spits out JSON, e.g. for database stats / management work / software with limited APIs (as in you get values but you have to do a fuckton of polishing to give them meaning).

As Excel stores the ref to the file, I can just refresh the source and update the diagrams, stats / tables / .... stored in seperate worksheets.

So the part that annoys me and I avoid is to regenerate the diagrams / formatting's / tables / ...

For simple export I agree, that would be overkill.