For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
> If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want [...]
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
The solution is actually just not using Excel. If you're essentially using Excel as a LOB backend and database, that should probably not be in Excel.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
Yes, there's many many cases that should likely not be using Excel.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
I've been there, the problem is that replacements are not as versatile or "floppy". But that's also a good thing, because Excel is too versatile to the point where most workbooks are filled with bugs on top of bugs and nobody cares.
Yes, bugs in sheets are worst part of excel, by far.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
Have to disagree. It depends on what you are doing. That the alternatives can be replacements, including the open source ones, is relative and should be looked at as a percentage.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
A whole lot of accountants/bookkeepers (including I) will totally disagree with you. LibreOffice is very good.. and not just Calc either. Writing a novel in Writer is a pleasure.
More people should use and contribute to LibreOffice!
Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
Probably been about 2 years since I was forced to last use it but with amount of slop being added, their development priorities would have to massively changed.
All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
I agree it is not really controversial, I don't think any other explanation is credible. And it really calls into question their assertion that at least one person there has read every book on the list. They love these books, yet no one there cared enough to write a few sentences about them?
The trick is that this list of books amounts to nerd shibboleths. It's not important to have read them so much as be able to use them as a marker of being a smart person.
(That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking about their social function among a certain type of person, corporation or natural)
When they closed the discussion, they explicitly welcomed people to talk about it outside their issue tracker:
> Our issue trackers (other projects may differ) are used to track the work for maintainers or soliciting community contributions. They do not exist for people to debate the merits of decisions already made. We have Homebrew/discussions (and, well, the rest of the internet) for that.
They just don't want discussion about the merits of a settled decision to interfere with their work tracking when they provide a perfectly good discussion forum[1] for that.
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