Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
I think it’s mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can’t use Edge for that link, I’m not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
because of retarded decisions like that
“Retarded”, really? JFC what is this, 2001?
The definition of “retardation” is as follows:
- The act or process of delaying or impeding.
- The condition of being delayed or impeded.
- The extent to which something is held back or delayed.
Considering that the features being complained about impede the user, calling those features “retarded” is an adequate description.
It is also in-fitting with the definition of lacking of intellectual development; as mentioned, other programs do not feature such impediments, and in the case of Office 365, may actually be a regression of features.
Caveat emptor ESL here but, while that’s true, wouldn’t under those terms “retarding” be a much better fit?
Yes the decision isn’t retarded, it was made fast enough. The consequence is retarding though.
Retard has transitioned from an impartial term to one that is negatively loaded. For this reason, the term is now widely considered as degrading even when used in its original context.[10]
Much like today’s socially acceptable terms idiot and moron, which are also defined as some sort of mental disability, when the term retard is being used in its pejorative form, it is usually not being directed at people with mental disabilities. Instead, people use the term when teasing their friends or as a general insult.[11]
Do you think people who have the condition of mental retardation experience bigotry in our society? Are you not aware “retarded” has been used extensively as a slur? And are you so inconvenienced you can’t come up with a single less-problematic synonym?
Yes I am aware that retard has been used as a slur… Against those that don’t have any reason to behave like a retard.
I do not see any issue.
FYI you can change that in settings to launch the systems default browser. Extra steps yes, but the option is there.
because of retarded decisions like that
You know you could have just used shitty instead of using a slur, which would have the same emphasis without the baggage of the other word.
Idiot. Moron. Imbecile. All words used as retarded before it. 🤷♂️
Seriously, wtf is wrong with this website? I saw this again just this week. Next I know these a holes will be going around calling things gay. "WeLl AlShUlLy ThE dEfInItIoN Of GaY iS HaPpY sO… "
If you really felt it necessary to offer a synonym, you could have said “backward” … because that’s what the word actually means
Shitty has a different meaning. Above commenter meant to say the person making the decision was differently abled with regards to their cognitive capabilities. The other is excrement.
In what way? I use it a lot and feel like it’s still on par with the older versions. It’s got some annoying “Microsoft-y” things typical to them from the last 10 years or so but I think the core functionality is still intact.
I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can’t say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
It’s turning complete, so it’s should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I’m not sure, if it’s autocorrect or misinformation, but it’s “Turing complete”, after Alan Turing.
It’s as in once you try it there is no turning back
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
I once saw a post on reddit where a bored guy in his office stream movies from his home PC to Excel.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
well excel IS a database
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
Until it has an odbc connection to a sql server or access db it’s still low level wizardry.
you can access sql from excel? i am now officially horrified.
Next time you open excel go to the data tab and look at all the things it can do.
It really shouldn’t do those things, but it can.
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don’t get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it’s still in use, but yeah.“Only a trainee…”
Sounds like you’re the only one keeping that thing running. Don’t sell yourself short!
my boss does appreciate what i’m doing but i just don’t have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can’t tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace “New” Outlook is.
For Microsoft, “Modern, sleek, streamlined” are just marketing terms for “We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you’ll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development.”
Those are different categories of problems.
Excel really does too much. Biologists literally renamed a genom because Excel kept turning it into a date. If any other database did that, the vendor would hear a friendly but stern “get fucked”.
They’re using a spreadsheet and getting burned when it acts like a spreadsheet. It’s like complaining that a screwdriver did a bad job hammering nails.
Yeah, that’s my point. Excel is almost never the right tool, but since it’s doing so much, it can be used for almost anything, just in a very shitty manner. And in reality, it is used for almost anything.
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn’t reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don’t want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there’s probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can’t exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
Outlook really has a lot of obscure features that not many people used. I think it’s good for them to cull these less used features and later re-add them rewritten in a more supportable manner.
I also really appreciate the emoji-reactions because I don’t have to type out a response expressing that I have read and acknowledge an email, I can just give it a thumbs up and move on, and they don’t receive a whole email to read, they just see that it got a thumbs up and can move on too
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It’s one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
Shame you can’t just buy it.
You can. It’s expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.
I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don’t need PowerPoint or a word processor, I’d rather it not be included in the price at all.
Also, they’ve made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that’s the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that’s a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.
Saying you mastered excel is like saying you mastered meth
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
What do Excel and Incels have in common?
They assume everything is a date.
You can turn that off now.
How about an Excel with Python scripting? That would be awesome.
Not sure if you’re joking, but that’s a thing. You can just insert python scripts into a cell and have their return values be the cell value.
Python in Excel requires Internet access because calculations run on remote servers in the Microsoft Cloud. The calculations are not run by your local Excel application.
matlab
Octave works as a great replacement
MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.
If you don’t like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It’s for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn’t appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.
I want to love Julia so much, but it’s always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again…
There’s a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
I hate power automate so so so much
Why?
The licensing process is very confusing for starters.
I guess I’m so used to thinking in code, and power automate seems hell-bent on being aimed at More business oriented folks. I find it extremely unintuitive, and downright hostile in terms of actually getting something done that I know how to do, but I’m not allowed to.
100%. Power automate doing anything other than the templates they have is almost always harder than just writing python
That’s why I use Powershell with the Graph API module. Of course running scripts is probably disabled for non admins.
Power automate has so much potential and promise, but it just sucks to implement anything more than built in templates.
I use mainly python at work, but usually exit to excel to share the results to other people.
Openpyxl is for you.
I use Pandas, but im sure i have that library installed for Pandas use.
Man I guess I’m spoiled. We get access to the top row except SolidWorks because we license an alternative. We use the entire MS suite too though but as a supplement. I don’t use excel hardly at all because JMP is superior in every single way, except for dashboards where we use PowerBI.
despite all my rage i’m still just a rat in a cave
Excel is a powerful tool. I was solving system of differential equations with Newton method in it. Sometimes it is easier than in Matlab (or Mathematica) if all you have is good understanding of how step-wise equations should look like, but not the differential equations themselves. Those steps may include if statements, for example.
Had to do a similar project and it took me three full days of back and forth with another software before I found out EXCEL rounds small numbers in very weird ways.
Also, in EXCEL functions/formulas and data/values are wildly mixed.
(Not mentioning a plethora of other mildly infuriating quirks here)
Call me crazy, but the admittance matrix hw (Gaussian, G-S, Newton, N-R, etc.) I did last semester was much more intuitive for me on MATLAB than on Excel… but I’m gonna get screwed for that because a vast majority of companies would never bother to pay for MATLAB (+ Toolboxes) licenses.
There is always Octave.
And I am not claiming that Excel is better than Matlab. There are lots of tasks where Matlab is better, or where it is not even possible to use Excel with any efficiency. And yet, Excel IS a powerful tool for scientists and engineers. Not just for accountants.
What does it do that LibreOffice Calc doesn’t do?
Embed objects and query spaces from other Microsoft products, mainly.
It’s a circular argument that all of the corporate world is too heavily invested in to change.
Not lagging horribly with big tables after calculating a simple formula? That’s the only thing i can think of. Everything else is just very similar
Oh but excel does lag heavily with any table over a couple megabytes, of course that’s only on my computer
You probably have apple stuff or Intel or windows /s
Almost nothing, considering Calc is a clone. I don’t think people are excluding LibreOffice from the list of smooth brain apps.
Does libre office do pivot charts?
Smooth scrolling.
Kind of serious, the lack of smooth scrolling makes Calc really horrible to use on a touchpad or with large/differing sized cells (formatted sheets with headers and such)
Matlab excels at dgls, Excel does math not. Newton method isn’t it
Your IT is retarded if they won’t let you use SOLIDWORKS or python
It’s usually just one manager making a clear case for the business need through the proper channel from being installed in most businesses
“Frank, you are the janitor.”
Garbage software is one of the primary reasons I left my last job despite high pay. It just got too friggin annoying to use. They’d roll out a ‘hotfix’ to fix something they had broken 3 months earlier and they’d break 2 new things which previously had been working fine for years. The support was so bad I just bought a magic eight ball for our office and we’d ask it our support questions.
Yardi, I’m looking at you.
Damn, I really dodged a bullet there… by them rejecting my application.
Engineer in uni vs engineering job?
The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can’t unsee it.
why did you have to say this
Nope I’m not seeing it personally.
Thanks! I can’t unsee it but I like it more now 😆
They missed using Access incorrectly with too many users and too large of a database.
I for one think this demonstrates how overpriced universities are. All of academia is comparable to a ponzi scheme.
