this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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It's not like businesses can just not use Excel or whatever. Microsoft has everyone by the balls and they know it.
LibreOffice. I'm surprised anyone uses any Microsoft product these days given that they shit all over their users.
Excel is a brilliant program, some may even call it excellent.
Businesses run on Excel. While it's feasible (if painful) to replace Word or PowerPoint, replacing Excel is just out of the question.
From what I hear from my brother working in a bank, they should be using databases and data querying instead of excel. What excessive excel use leads to, at least in such cases, is awful flimsy practices, certainty and stability.
The financial data and its accumulations run through multiple excel files referencing others. Traceability requirements that they have to guarantee by law are an issue; I wonder if they'll be able to implement them with Excel at all.
Businesses running on Excel is certainly factual. But I have to wonder whether it's necessary of even a good solution for their work.
If they're deep and wide into Excel, I imagine other data tooling would be better. And if they're not, other products like LibreOffice seem viable as direct replacements.
It's an absolute shit solution but it's being used very widely. And it has certainly led to plenty of fuck ups.
Why is that? Is there just not enough support for exporting existing data across or does Excel have more features?
Every large company has sunk countless hours into training people, designing sheets, writing macros etc. Trying to move all that to a different product would be hugely painful and disruptive to everyday operations, because all of that would have to be redone and relearned. No company is going to do that.
Kind of correct but never say never. There should be a point upcoming where an explosive mixture of MS' software becoming too enshittified to make any more sense to use, and also too expensive to use (MS wants everyone to have a M365 subscription which they can then increase the prices for all the time), as well as competitor's growing stronger over the years as well, making them a more and more capable alternative, will result in MS Office losing market share and dominance. Windows is also already on a slow decline, it had around ~90% market share during the Win7 era and since then it's sliding downhill, at about ~70% right now. Sure it takes many years, decades even, but it's bound to happen with MS' current course of action as well as the competition growing better as well.
Many of my macros / vba code can't run on LibreOffice.
Because they're done with specific ms-office macros or because libre-office has no equivalents?
It may not be an immediate 1 to 1 switch with extensive or specific macros, but I would imagine it would be possible and no worse after migration?