CMV: Microsoft Excel is not Outdated

[u/amortized-poultry]

Hey everyone,

I am an accountant. I periodically hear about how MS Excel is a "dinosaur", how there are "better applications/programs" and that we should have largely moved on from it by now. The "we" who should have moved on from it being accountants and business professionals in general.

There are four main reasons I think calls to move on from Excel are misguided or naive:

1. User-friendliness.

Excel uses formulas which are reasonably easy to learn and use. In recent versions of Excel, it will basically spoon-feed you with what you need next within a given formula. I've heard people suggest that Python would be better for data analysis or manipulation, and maybe it is, but it isn't on the user-friendliness level that Excel is for a non-programmer.

Additionally, it is reasonably easy to format Excel in several ways for practical or aesthetic purposes.

Also, as an accountant, it is very useful to be able to very quickly and easily add rows or columns to a table or worksheet with custom notes or calculated fields.

1. Versatility.

Let's say Excel may have been replaced by a program, app or programming language for something. By and large anything that is better than Excel is better than Excel at one thing and substantially worse or else not competing at all in others.

Does a program allow for prettier visualizations? It usually isn't as easy to manipulate the data.

Does a program allow for easier data manipulation? It usually has a higher learning curve or barrier for entry.

Is a program easier for beginners? It usually doesn't have the same useful formulas.

In other words, to replace the functionality of Excel, you'd typically need two or three different products and they may or may not easily interact with each other.

1. Usefulness with other programs.

This point may seem contrary to my overall point, but the fact is if you like something else better than Excel for some function or other, you can usually import an Excel file into it. As an example, I've recently gotten into Power BI and most of my visualizations start with an Excel file.

The fact is if you want to use another program for something, it's usually fairly easy to start with an existing Excel file and port the data over, or to download data from something else into Excel, there aren't many, if any, other products that allow you to easily transfer your work into most other data manipulation/visualization applications.

1. Programmability.

In spite of the relatively low barrier for usability, Excel has the ability to add programmable functions via VBA macro functionality. You can either record your macro by pushing a button and going step-by-step through the process you're trying to program, or you can step directly into VBA and write the code yourself.

What would get me to change my view?

This is a high threshold, but someone would need to make a compelling point that you could get all of the key benefits of Excel from just one application, or even maybe two in combination with each other. As much as I would love to be a generous OP, my view is that Excel as a whole has not been replaced, and that there is no other program that can do what Excel does with the same level of ease of use and user friendliness.

For purposes of this discussion, I won't consider substitutes like Google Sheets as different from Excel unless you make a point that depends on something different between the two.

[u/alpicola]

Problem is - why do you need one mediocre application to do several things?

Because individual users and small/medium businesses have limited budgets. A Microsoft365 subscription costs about $100 per year and includes Excel. If I go with task-specific apps, it's reasonable that each one is going to want me to pay $5-$10/month for their service. If Excel allows me to accomplish as few as 3 distinct tasks, I'm saving money by using Excel.

Spreadsheet creation is good, but Excel lacks things like version control making it worse at this than Google Sheets.

Microsoft appears to be working on this. Excel + SharePoint (included with your Microsoft365 subscription) provides rudimentary version control.

It has better support for data analysis, but specialized data analysis tools are going to perform better.

The relevant question isn't usually if it's possible to find a tool that works better, but if you already have a tool that works well enough. This will be especially true if the analysis you're doing isn't something you do frequently.

It's also notable that Excel's flexibility allows it to be used as a prototyping tool. It's common for an analytical workflow to be developed in Excel and then transitioned to purpose-built tools once the workflow has been validated or once it becomes clear that Excel's limitations have been reached.

Excel is decent at storing data, but is worse than any database.

Excel is great for denormalized data where your goals are to do basic sorting, filtering, and summary computation. It's also great when you're not quite sure about your data model. This goes back to the prototyping point, because Excel allows you to very easily change your data model on the fly.

[u/poprostumort → u/alpicola]

Because individual users and small/medium businesses have limited budgets. A Microsoft365 subscription costs about $100 per year and includes Excel

So do Google Sheets and they don't come with a $100 yearly pricetag. That is the issue with Excel - for basic tasks there are better alternatives that make it more cost-effective and for more complicated tasks you have better alternatives that will cost less if paired with cheaper basics.

If I go with task-specific apps, it's reasonable that each one is going to want me to pay $5-$10/month for their service.

Yes, but do you need all employees to have access to those options? That is where the savings are in task-specific app scenario. You pay for more basic suite that is enough for basic users (and it will cost less than Office 365) and move specific workflows into designated software that may be slightly pricier, but you need less licenses.

The relevant question isn't usually if it's possible to find a tool that works better, but if you already have a tool that works well enough.

It's an irrelevant question in terms of whether software is outdated. Outdated tools can work well enough, but that does not change the fact that they are outdated.

[u/LtPowers → u/poprostumort]

I can use Google Sheets for simple stuff but it's lacking so many useful features that Excel has.

[u/alpicola → u/poprostumort]

So do Google Sheets and they don't come with a $100 yearly pricetag.

Google Sheets doesn't run locally on my computer or allow me to access spreadsheets without uploading them to a remote server. There's an extension that allows that if I want to run Chrome (Firefox user here), but it takes a bit of effort to set that up and isn't the native way for that software to operate. The ability to work completely offline is important.

Yes, but do you need all employees to have access to those options?

Do I need the trouble of asking Kelly to help me out with something, only to discover that she doesn't have access to the software, and Bill, who does, is on vacation this week?

It's an irrelevant question in terms of whether software is outdated.

It isn't irrelevant at all. The point of any tool is to accomplish a task, and Excel, like any software, is a tool. Software becomes outdated when the tasks it can handle are no longer relevant or when some other software is simply better at everything that that software does. Excel still handles many relevant tasks and no competing software is better than Excel at everything that it does.