Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The dangerous things about excel, imho, are:

1. Too many different places for functionality to hide. Are these numbers updated by external links? VBA? Pivot tables? Equations? Some addin?

2. Difficult to version control. To capture all the functionality its not enough to just strip the VBA code into git, you need to track a lot of other config variables related to the features in 1.

3. Crap accretion. Complex spreadsheets have a tendency to accumulate broken external links, redundant named ranges, and extraneous scratchpad sheets as people copy data around. This makes troubleshooting harder just by increasing the amount of noise.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: