I'll take plain text over WYSIWYG any day, thanks. Excel gives you some obvious way to do some things and stacks up a huge load of features so you can hack your problem into the Excel way. But the Excel way tends to be terrible from start to finish. People stopped doing Double-entry bookkeeping because it's somehow hard in the world's most used accounting software while saner programs like ledger-cli and beancount make it very easy. For any moderately complex work, coupling data and data manipulation is a very bad idea, and having both in an opaque, non-diffable, non-VCS-able file is just making hell out of everyone's life for no good reason.
I understand if you just want to put your data in a table and do some math with it. Sometimes it's all you know how to use and you end up doing something important with it, that's okay. Sometimes it's all your peers know how to use and you choose Excel because of them, that's great. Laziness and inertia are just facts of the world and we have to accept it exists, but please don't pretend we can't do better than Excel most of the time.
> I understand if you just want to put your data in a table and do some math with it.
But this is huge and what most people use Excel/Sheets for, in their day-to-day work.
I have used Excel (and nowadays Sheets, because it’s free) for years in both my personal and professional life, just for this purpose. I’ve probably used this more than any single tool/app.
Plain text has its place, but saying that it is a replacement for Excel/Sheets is overlooking a huge reason it’s so useful.
> and nowadays Sheets, because it’s free … in my professional life
It isn’t. For pro use it’s by and large the same cost as O365, $12/user/month if you get a usable plan. (Both offer a $6/user/month plan, but on MS side that doesn’t have desktop apps, and on Google side it doesn’t have storage.)
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Never said everyone should simply replace it. I, myself, would prefer not to use Excel because I am proficient in ledger and org-mode which absolutely does supplant that use case (and much more). The criticism here is when you have complex data and manipulation and attempt to use a terrible tool for that job. Excel in fact IS good for some things, but unfortunately happens to be usable, and commonly used, for things it's terrible at.
> I'll take plain text over WYSIWYG any day, thanks.
I couldn't agree more. It's a bit convoluted, but one thing you can do is write code in plain text files, in the Power Query M language, and load it using a combination of Folder.Files [0], BinaryFormat.Text [1], and Expression.Evaluate [2] (in the #shared environment).
On the downside, everything is no longer self-contained in the workbook. On the upside, everything is no longer self-contained in the workbook, and you can actually, like, check the code into git.
I understand if you just want to put your data in a table and do some math with it. Sometimes it's all you know how to use and you end up doing something important with it, that's okay. Sometimes it's all your peers know how to use and you choose Excel because of them, that's great. Laziness and inertia are just facts of the world and we have to accept it exists, but please don't pretend we can't do better than Excel most of the time.