{"slug": "microsoft-excel", "name": "Microsoft Excel", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Microsoft's spreadsheet application for calculations, data analysis and charting, part of Microsoft 365.", "recommenders": 17, "commenters": 36, "warners": 8, "score": 11.116, "rising": 5.05, "first": "2025-11-05", "latest": "2026-10-31", "why": "Liked as an approachable, reactive tool that lets non-programmers and domain experts build working solutions, and many say it is hard to replace for business and finance work.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 17, "neutral": 11, "compare": 0, "warn": 8}, "spark": [1, 4, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 5, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Accessible power", "Hard to replace"], "caveat": "Declining quality", "short_quote": "Excel in the hands of somebody that can actually use it is an incredibly powerful tool.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/excel", "pricing": "paid", "aliases": ["Excel", "Microsoft Excel"], "verdict": [{"text": "Liked as an approachable, reactive tool that lets non-programmers and domain experts build working solutions,", "cites": [{"id": 802878496, "item_id": 50179906, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179906", "by": "zarify", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger", "excerpt": "I used the Excel example the other day. What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger, and so folks who have the domain expertise can do something useful with it. It\u2019s easy to look down on it as fragile, ugly, insecure or whatever, but by and large it works for solving people\u2019s problems. I see vibe coding the same way. There\u2019s going to be ", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets for domain experts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Have you observed this trend of building \"internal vibe-coding apps\"?"}, {"id": 781333888, "item_id": 48833368, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833368", "by": "pavel_lishin", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.", "excerpt": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the \"none\" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm no", "context": "", "use_case": "data analysis and presentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "The difference between \"today's task\" and \"accretive work\""}, {"id": 739346400, "item_id": 46209150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209150", "by": "znpy", "date": "2025-12-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel in the hands of somebody that can actually use it is an incredibly powerful tool.", "excerpt": "It's undeniably cool. Years ago i became team leader and managed shifts for my team. I used an excel spreadsheet that some person from accounting made for us. It was incredibly featureful, visually instant (shifts were immediately understandable), it was ridiculously FAST to use. And through the cloud services was available to everybody in the team and outside. Developing something similar in any other programming la", "context": "team leader managing shifts", "use_case": "shift scheduling", "switched_from": "", "story": "54% of 22\u201332\u2011year\u2011old finance professionals \"love\" Excel"}, {"id": 797652336, "item_id": 49853271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853271", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers.", "excerpt": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers. The fact that everything is reactive allows for very fast iteration when testing stuff. I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near \"complicated\". It's still valuable for what I use for.", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "number crunching and fast iteration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}]}, {"text": " and many say it is hard to replace for business and finance work.", "cites": [{"id": 797729185, "item_id": 49858074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858074", "by": "ukadakal", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is much stickier than most people realize.", "excerpt": "I love Claude and use it for many things, including analyzing and manipulating Excel files. But I\u2019m not convinced that replacing spreadsheets with Claude is the right approach. Over the years, we\u2019ve seen many platforms promise to replace spreadsheets for a particular use case or industry. Businesses adopt them and push users away from Excel, but in many cases, those same users eventually find their way back to Excel ", "context": "", "use_case": "business spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 791734400, "item_id": 49483400, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483400", "by": "preg_match", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned.", "excerpt": "Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro", "context": "", "use_case": "high-volume data entry", "switched_from": "", "story": "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"}, {"id": 793404384, "item_id": 49587774, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49587774", "by": "lo0dot0", "date": "2026-09-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "still not as flawless as Excel", "excerpt": "Anecdotal evidence but when I used duckdb and Python and Pycharm the Pycharm table viewer was not working as well as Excel. The rendering was messed up. Could be related to the remote desktop rendering but still not as flawless as Excel. The patchwork of multiple software from different vendors needed to replace Excel with database plus viewer plus Code has downsides compared to the single app single file solution th", "context": "", "use_case": "viewing and working with tabular data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System"}, {"id": 738584752, "item_id": 46161547, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161547", "by": "antasvara", "date": "2025-12-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel really shines because it's designed for business.", "excerpt": "Just wanted to shout out the ability to copy, paste, and transpose the data using your mouse and keyboard. The ability to combine and reorganize data without needing to program is huge. It means you can grab data from an online source, paste your results into a report you're writing, quickly flip some data, etc. Other commenters have covered the major reasons Excel is so popular. But Excel really shines because it's ", "context": "R user", "use_case": "copying and reorganizing data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why we can\u2019t quit Excel"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is declining quality, with reports of bloat, broken pasting and phone-home licensing,", "cites": [{"id": 797667904, "item_id": 49854244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854244", "by": "dreamcompiler", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft has enshittified it.", "excerpt": "I used to say Excel was the only truly useful, well-designed piece of software Microsoft ever made. It's an amazing example of dataflow programming and for that reason alone it's worthy of study. Alas, Microsoft has enshittified it. Excel used to be a standalone program, then they made it online with the offline version hard to find. I bought that offline version only to discover it would stop working if it didn't ph", "context": "Mac user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 795206145, "item_id": 49700384, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700384", "by": "lovich", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers", "excerpt": "I\u2019m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don\u2019t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it\u2019s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"}, {"id": 735457811, "item_id": 45966113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45966113", "by": "edferda", "date": "2025-11-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "excel is slowly morphing into an unusable bloated behemoth", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Windows my entire life. In the past, I tried Linux without much success, switching back within a few weeks. However, Microsoft\u2019s software is just beyond bad these days. Simple actions take seconds, the UI/UX feels designed to make you waste time, and the fundamentals of what an OS should do feel broken. It\u2019s hard to overstate how bad quality has gotten. This motivated me to move to Linux and installed", "context": "lifelong Windows user, uses Windows at work", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders"}]}, {"text": " plus quirks when opening CSV files.", "cites": [{"id": 775283169, "item_id": 48455198, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455198", "by": "SdtEE", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel", "excerpt": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel, so I built a fast and lean viewer for CSV - at least this was what initially planned. Later I find the technique I developed to instantly load arbitrary large CSV files can be generalized to work with any format, with an incremental parser combinator. This means the tool can read from not only files, but any stream-oriented sources like a pipe. I did used", "context": "", "use_case": "opening CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 787961569, "item_id": 49247598, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247598", "by": "wkirby", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "files that excel won't even open", "excerpt": "I've got a suite of CSVs that represent both edge case and performance issues, and I script timing opening/common operations using Apple Scripting. It's not perfect, but it gives us a sense if we're introducing back-breaking regressions. I try for our large files to test specifically with real-world, large data dumps from US government sources; I feel these are representative of actual large-CSV workloads. You can se", "context": "builds a native offline CSV app", "use_case": "opening large CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 788606945, "item_id": 49287934, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287934", "by": "eszed", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is for the complicated stuff.", "excerpt": "Numbers is essential, because it understands dates, better handles CSV files, and doesn't corrupt long numeric UIDs. But, you're right: Excel is for the complicated stuff. I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data, and will never do any calculations with it. The financial folks are welcome to knock themselves out with their Excel wizardry. That separati", "context": "", "use_case": "complex calculations", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Accessible power", "summary": "People without much technical expertise can use it to do useful work in their own domain.", "quotes": [{"id": 802878496, "item_id": 50179906, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179906", "by": "zarify", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger", "excerpt": "I used the Excel example the other day. What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger, and so folks who have the domain expertise can do something useful with it. It\u2019s easy to look down on it as fragile, ugly, insecure or whatever, but by and large it works for solving people\u2019s problems. I see vibe coding the same way. There\u2019s going to be ", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets for domain experts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Have you observed this trend of building \"internal vibe-coding apps\"?"}, {"id": 781333888, "item_id": 48833368, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833368", "by": "pavel_lishin", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.", "excerpt": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the \"none\" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm no", "context": "", "use_case": "data analysis and presentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "The difference between \"today's task\" and \"accretive work\""}, {"id": 739346400, "item_id": 46209150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209150", "by": "znpy", "date": "2025-12-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel in the hands of somebody that can actually use it is an incredibly powerful tool.", "excerpt": "It's undeniably cool. Years ago i became team leader and managed shifts for my team. I used an excel spreadsheet that some person from accounting made for us. It was incredibly featureful, visually instant (shifts were immediately understandable), it was ridiculously FAST to use. And through the cloud services was available to everybody in the team and outside. Developing something similar in any other programming la", "context": "team leader managing shifts", "use_case": "shift scheduling", "switched_from": "", "story": "54% of 22\u201332\u2011year\u2011old finance professionals \"love\" Excel"}]}, {"label": "Hard to replace", "summary": "Users who try other tools often return to Excel, and its single-app, single-file setup is hard to match.", "quotes": [{"id": 797729185, "item_id": 49858074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858074", "by": "ukadakal", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is much stickier than most people realize.", "excerpt": "I love Claude and use it for many things, including analyzing and manipulating Excel files. But I\u2019m not convinced that replacing spreadsheets with Claude is the right approach. Over the years, we\u2019ve seen many platforms promise to replace spreadsheets for a particular use case or industry. Businesses adopt them and push users away from Excel, but in many cases, those same users eventually find their way back to Excel ", "context": "", "use_case": "business spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 793404384, "item_id": 49587774, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49587774", "by": "lo0dot0", "date": "2026-09-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "still not as flawless as Excel", "excerpt": "Anecdotal evidence but when I used duckdb and Python and Pycharm the Pycharm table viewer was not working as well as Excel. The rendering was messed up. Could be related to the remote desktop rendering but still not as flawless as Excel. The patchwork of multiple software from different vendors needed to replace Excel with database plus viewer plus Code has downsides compared to the single app single file solution th", "context": "", "use_case": "viewing and working with tabular data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System"}, {"id": 791734400, "item_id": 49483400, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483400", "by": "preg_match", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned.", "excerpt": "Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro", "context": "", "use_case": "high-volume data entry", "switched_from": "", "story": "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"}]}, {"label": "Business workflows", "summary": "Praised for business, finance and engineering work such as reorganizing data, building tools and doing taxes.", "quotes": [{"id": 738584752, "item_id": 46161547, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161547", "by": "antasvara", "date": "2025-12-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel really shines because it's designed for business.", "excerpt": "Just wanted to shout out the ability to copy, paste, and transpose the data using your mouse and keyboard. The ability to combine and reorganize data without needing to program is huge. It means you can grab data from an online source, paste your results into a report you're writing, quickly flip some data, etc. Other commenters have covered the major reasons Excel is so popular. But Excel really shines because it's ", "context": "R user", "use_case": "copying and reorganizing data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why we can\u2019t quit Excel"}, {"id": 788606945, "item_id": 49287934, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287934", "by": "eszed", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is for the complicated stuff.", "excerpt": "Numbers is essential, because it understands dates, better handles CSV files, and doesn't corrupt long numeric UIDs. But, you're right: Excel is for the complicated stuff. I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data, and will never do any calculations with it. The financial folks are welcome to knock themselves out with their Excel wizardry. That separati", "context": "", "use_case": "complex calculations", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"}, {"id": 797626608, "item_id": 49851663, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851663", "by": "wildzzz", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools.", "excerpt": "I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly us", "context": "worked at enterprise engineering places", "use_case": "engineering tools and GUIs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}]}, {"label": "Fast iteration", "summary": "Reactive recalculation gives instant feedback and quick iteration, even for programmers.", "quotes": [{"id": 797652336, "item_id": 49853271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853271", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers.", "excerpt": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers. The fact that everything is reactive allows for very fast iteration when testing stuff. I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near \"complicated\". It's still valuable for what I use for.", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "number crunching and fast iteration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 781333888, "item_id": 48833368, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833368", "by": "pavel_lishin", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.", "excerpt": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the \"none\" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm no", "context": "", "use_case": "data analysis and presentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "The difference between \"today's task\" and \"accretive work\""}]}, {"label": "Keyboard speed", "summary": "Heavy users value being able to work quickly from the keyboard.", "quotes": [{"id": 791734400, "item_id": 49483400, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483400", "by": "preg_match", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned.", "excerpt": "Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro", "context": "", "use_case": "high-volume data entry", "switched_from": "", "story": "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"}, {"id": 756689200, "item_id": 47293075, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293075", "by": "star-glider", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter.", "excerpt": "I started my career in finance, and I used scroll lock constantly. When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter. Even today, my keyboard remap file swaps it with \"insert\" to put it in easier reach (it's also far less potentially destructive when pressed accidentally).", "context": "started career in finance", "use_case": "finance spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lock Scroll with a Vengeance"}, {"id": 739346400, "item_id": 46209150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209150", "by": "znpy", "date": "2025-12-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel in the hands of somebody that can actually use it is an incredibly powerful tool.", "excerpt": "It's undeniably cool. Years ago i became team leader and managed shifts for my team. I used an excel spreadsheet that some person from accounting made for us. It was incredibly featureful, visually instant (shifts were immediately understandable), it was ridiculously FAST to use. And through the cloud services was available to everybody in the team and outside. Developing something similar in any other programming la", "context": "team leader managing shifts", "use_case": "shift scheduling", "switched_from": "", "story": "54% of 22\u201332\u2011year\u2011old finance professionals \"love\" Excel"}]}, {"label": "New type features", "summary": "A long-time user called a recent type-system feature the only revolutionary change in 30 years.", "quotes": [{"id": 797720672, "item_id": 49857542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857542", "by": "ed_elliott_asc", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I\u2019ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it.", "excerpt": "I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I\u2019ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it. There have been obviously lots of change but nothing like this, incrementally adding functions etc but this changes the type system like nothing else I\u2019ve seen.", "context": "30-year Excel user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Declining quality", "summary": "Commenters report bloat, broken pasting, an awkward scrollbar and licensing that phones home.", "quotes": [{"id": 797667904, "item_id": 49854244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854244", "by": "dreamcompiler", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft has enshittified it.", "excerpt": "I used to say Excel was the only truly useful, well-designed piece of software Microsoft ever made. It's an amazing example of dataflow programming and for that reason alone it's worthy of study. Alas, Microsoft has enshittified it. Excel used to be a standalone program, then they made it online with the offline version hard to find. I bought that offline version only to discover it would stop working if it didn't ph", "context": "Mac user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 795206145, "item_id": 49700384, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700384", "by": "lovich", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers", "excerpt": "I\u2019m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don\u2019t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it\u2019s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"}, {"id": 735457811, "item_id": 45966113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45966113", "by": "edferda", "date": "2025-11-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "excel is slowly morphing into an unusable bloated behemoth", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Windows my entire life. In the past, I tried Linux without much success, switching back within a few weeks. However, Microsoft\u2019s software is just beyond bad these days. Simple actions take seconds, the UI/UX feels designed to make you waste time, and the fundamentals of what an OS should do feel broken. It\u2019s hard to overstate how bad quality has gotten. This motivated me to move to Linux and installed", "context": "lifelong Windows user, uses Windows at work", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders"}]}, {"label": "CSV handling", "summary": "Opening CSV files brings quirks, and some large files will not open at all.", "quotes": [{"id": 775283169, "item_id": 48455198, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455198", "by": "SdtEE", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel", "excerpt": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel, so I built a fast and lean viewer for CSV - at least this was what initially planned. Later I find the technique I developed to instantly load arbitrary large CSV files can be generalized to work with any format, with an incremental parser combinator. This means the tool can read from not only files, but any stream-oriented sources like a pipe. I did used", "context": "", "use_case": "opening CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 787961569, "item_id": 49247598, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247598", "by": "wkirby", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "files that excel won't even open", "excerpt": "I've got a suite of CSVs that represent both edge case and performance issues, and I script timing opening/common operations using Apple Scripting. It's not perfect, but it gives us a sense if we're introducing back-breaking regressions. I try for our large files to test specifically with real-world, large data dumps from US government sources; I feel these are representative of actual large-CSV workloads. You can se", "context": "builds a native offline CSV app", "use_case": "opening large CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 788606945, "item_id": 49287934, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287934", "by": "eszed", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is for the complicated stuff.", "excerpt": "Numbers is essential, because it understands dates, better handles CSV files, and doesn't corrupt long numeric UIDs. But, you're right: Excel is for the complicated stuff. I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data, and will never do any calculations with it. The financial folks are welcome to knock themselves out with their Excel wizardry. That separati", "context": "", "use_case": "complex calculations", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"}]}, {"label": "Complex formulas", "summary": "Nested lookup formulas and range references are hard to get right and error-prone.", "quotes": [{"id": 733203266, "item_id": 45825204, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825204", "by": "newscracker", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love spreadsheets.", "excerpt": "I feel what this article says based on some recent (non-catastrophic) experiences. I think I\u2019m probably an above average user when it comes to Excel skills. I love spreadsheets. But I struggle with formulas like index, match, vlookup/xlookup and many others, and even more so when it requires nesting one within another and coming up with the underlying logic that leads to some complex nested formulas. Over the past co", "context": "above average Excel user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "I\u2019m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel"}, {"id": 793198080, "item_id": 49574880, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574880", "by": "TacticalCoder", "date": "2026-09-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "it's ultra-powerful stuff, but you basically have to be a programmer to understand what's doable", "excerpt": "> Spreadsheet formulas can refer to rectangular ranges of arbitrary size. When a user changes the structure of a referenced table, the spreadsheet system updates the references to refer to a new range. Unfortunately, this new range may differ from the user's expectations, introducing bugs in spreadsheets. We describe a user study showing that standard reference semantics are error-prone Yeah. It's a pet-peeve of mine", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System"}, {"id": 805060417, "item_id": 50316276, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50316276", "by": "kenyounot", "date": "2026-10-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "anything is better than excel", "excerpt": "MoneyPouch is a self hosted expense tracker that focuses on quick manual entry of transactions using keyboard shortcuts. It currently only supports USD currency and whatever banks SimpleFin supports for bank syncing. Try it out using the demo site and read more about it in the README and let me know what works, what doesn't. Any feedback is appreciated. I used an excel sheet for the longest time and this was ugly and", "context": "", "use_case": "expense tracking", "switched_from": "", "story": "MoneyPouch \u2013 self hosted expense tracker"}]}, {"label": "Maintainability", "summary": "There is no good testing, source control or modularity, so complex sheets are hard to maintain.", "quotes": [{"id": 781333888, "item_id": 48833368, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833368", "by": "pavel_lishin", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.", "excerpt": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the \"none\" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm no", "context": "", "use_case": "data analysis and presentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "The difference between \"today's task\" and \"accretive work\""}, {"id": 797652336, "item_id": 49853271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853271", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers.", "excerpt": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers. The fact that everything is reactive allows for very fast iteration when testing stuff. I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near \"complicated\". It's still valuable for what I use for.", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "number crunching and fast iteration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 743180832, "item_id": 46448802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46448802", "by": "jimnotgym", "date": "2025-12-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Excel a lot", "excerpt": "I use Excel a lot, and run a team that use it more. One of biggest tips I give is to not write complex formulae if you can help it. Split it into more cells, so it goes step by step. It looks less cool, but when you have to edit it in 6 months you will thank me. It is not always possible, of course. But it normally is. For the edge cases a helper like this must be nice. Maybe some fields have lots of edge cases, mine", "context": "Runs a team that uses Excel heavily", "use_case": "spreadsheets for team", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Frockly \u2013 A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas"}]}, {"label": "Calculation errors", "summary": "Floating-point rounding errors make it unreliable for accounting work.", "quotes": [{"id": 750484928, "item_id": 46905308, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905308", "by": "belter", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...", "excerpt": "HN ignorance on display... The Journal of Accountancy - \"Bugged by Excel\u2019s calculation errors\" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-calculation-errors/ ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) \u2014 \"Rounding Errors Revisited\" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/excel-community-articles/2022/excel-tips-and-tricks-447 Just a reminder that an accountant w", "context": "", "use_case": "accounting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6"}]}, {"label": "File versioning", "summary": "Sharing files on network drives leads to messy versioning and editing conflicts.", "quotes": [{"id": 802217969, "item_id": 50138623, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138623", "by": "remuskaos", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not", "excerpt": "Google is completely out of the question. As I said, we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not. Google Sheets is not a viable option: Everyone in the company knows Excel. Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete the", "context": "company entrenched in Excel", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 802215601, "item_id": 50138475, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138475", "by": "remuskaos", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative", "excerpt": "Same question I've had in the other comment. What is your preferred alternative to SharePoint? Because we do need document sharing, and I don't see a viable way away from Excel for us. Right now we're sharing Excel files on network drives, which is horrible for versioning files, so I'd rather prefer something like SharePoint, but not from Microsoft. LibreOffice and Collabora don't seem to be there yet. Personally, I ", "context": "company entrenched in Excel", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}]}], "who": [{"by": "remuskaos", "context": "company entrenched in Excel", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138623", "date": "2026-10-18"}, {"by": "ed_elliott_asc", "context": "30-year Excel user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857542", "date": "2026-09-26"}, {"by": "tombert", "context": "programmer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853271", "date": "2026-09-26"}, {"by": "wildzzz", "context": "worked at enterprise engineering places", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851663", "date": "2026-09-25"}, {"by": "TacticalCoder", "context": "programmer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574880", "date": "2026-09-05"}, {"by": "saevarom", "context": "runs the count at an Icelandic constituency", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489804", "date": "2026-08-29"}, {"by": "xeromal", "context": "helps family who own small businesses", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388226", "date": "2026-08-21"}, {"by": "jedberg", "context": "tracks daily data for an illness", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348603", "date": "2026-08-18"}, {"by": "NarcisMirandes", "context": "lives in a small European country, uses translations daily", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183735", "date": "2026-08-05"}, {"by": "star-glider", "context": "started career in finance", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293075", "date": "2026-03-07"}, {"by": "al_borland", "context": "works at a company standardized on MS Office", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096298", "date": "2026-02-20"}, {"by": "jimnotgym", "context": "Runs a team that uses Excel heavily", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46448802", "date": "2025-12-31"}], "tags": ["for finance teams", "for non-programmers", "for engineering tools", "for enterprise teams", "for personal tracking"], "use_cases": ["spreadsheets", "expense tracking", "spreadsheets for domain experts", "price calculation and processes", "business spreadsheets", "number crunching and fast iteration"], "compared": [{"slug": "libreoffice", "name": "LibreOffice", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "google-sheets", "name": "Google Sheets", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "numbers", "name": "Numbers", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "sharepoint", "name": "SharePoint", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gridcraft", "name": "gridcraft", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849832", "title": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130228", "title": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516962", "title": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285268", "title": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50316275", "title": "MoneyPouch \u2013 self hosted expense tracker", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176063", "title": "Ask HN: Have you observed this trend of building \"internal vibe-coding apps\"?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 4}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 6, "warn": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 5, "warn": 3}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1, "warn": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 805060417, "item_id": 50316276, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50316276", "by": "kenyounot", "date": "2026-10-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "anything is better than excel", "excerpt": "MoneyPouch is a self hosted expense tracker that focuses on quick manual entry of transactions using keyboard shortcuts. It currently only supports USD currency and whatever banks SimpleFin supports for bank syncing. Try it out using the demo site and read more about it in the README and let me know what works, what doesn't. Any feedback is appreciated. I used an excel sheet for the longest time and this was ugly and", "context": "", "use_case": "expense tracking", "switched_from": "", "story": "MoneyPouch \u2013 self hosted expense tracker"}, {"id": 802878496, "item_id": 50179906, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179906", "by": "zarify", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger", "excerpt": "I used the Excel example the other day. What Excel gave us is a tool that was simple enough that people without a lot of technical expertise could wield it in anger, and so folks who have the domain expertise can do something useful with it. It\u2019s easy to look down on it as fragile, ugly, insecure or whatever, but by and large it works for solving people\u2019s problems. I see vibe coding the same way. There\u2019s going to be ", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets for domain experts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Have you observed this trend of building \"internal vibe-coding apps\"?"}, {"id": 802217969, "item_id": 50138623, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138623", "by": "remuskaos", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not", "excerpt": "Google is completely out of the question. As I said, we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not. Google Sheets is not a viable option: Everyone in the company knows Excel. Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete the", "context": "company entrenched in Excel", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 802215601, "item_id": 50138475, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138475", "by": "remuskaos", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative", "excerpt": "Same question I've had in the other comment. What is your preferred alternative to SharePoint? Because we do need document sharing, and I don't see a viable way away from Excel for us. Right now we're sharing Excel files on network drives, which is horrible for versioning files, so I'd rather prefer something like SharePoint, but not from Microsoft. LibreOffice and Collabora don't seem to be there yet. Personally, I ", "context": "company entrenched in Excel", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 802214258, "item_id": 50138391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50138391", "by": "remuskaos", "date": "2026-10-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I don't see a way away from excel.", "excerpt": "Serious question: what's your preferred alternative to SharePoint? We have an eclectic portemonteau of software, bookstack for docs, outlook and ms-365 for office etc. We're not a software company, think more mercantile and manufacture. We have a lot of stuff in excel, price calc, processes etc. I don't see a way away from excel. Currently we have all xls files on network drives, which is hard to maintain. Even thoug", "context": "works at a non-software mercantile and manufacturing company", "use_case": "price calculation and processes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"}, {"id": 800987120, "item_id": 50061695, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50061695", "by": "jdw64", "date": "2026-10-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I hate Excel and curse it, but in the end, I use it", "excerpt": "New and good software exists only in the minds of software developers. Every piece of software that actually exists is a target of complaint. I hate Excel and curse it, but in the end, I use it \u2014 that's just how it is.", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Where is all the new, good software?"}, {"id": 797729185, "item_id": 49858074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858074", "by": "ukadakal", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is much stickier than most people realize.", "excerpt": "I love Claude and use it for many things, including analyzing and manipulating Excel files. But I\u2019m not convinced that replacing spreadsheets with Claude is the right approach. Over the years, we\u2019ve seen many platforms promise to replace spreadsheets for a particular use case or industry. Businesses adopt them and push users away from Excel, but in many cases, those same users eventually find their way back to Excel ", "context": "", "use_case": "business spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 797720672, "item_id": 49857542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857542", "by": "ed_elliott_asc", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I\u2019ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it.", "excerpt": "I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I\u2019ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it. There have been obviously lots of change but nothing like this, incrementally adding functions etc but this changes the type system like nothing else I\u2019ve seen.", "context": "30-year Excel user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 797667904, "item_id": 49854244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49854244", "by": "dreamcompiler", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft has enshittified it.", "excerpt": "I used to say Excel was the only truly useful, well-designed piece of software Microsoft ever made. It's an amazing example of dataflow programming and for that reason alone it's worthy of study. Alas, Microsoft has enshittified it. Excel used to be a standalone program, then they made it online with the offline version hard to find. I bought that offline version only to discover it would stop working if it didn't ph", "context": "Mac user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 797652336, "item_id": 49853271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853271", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers.", "excerpt": "Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers. The fact that everything is reactive allows for very fast iteration when testing stuff. I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near \"complicated\". It's still valuable for what I use for.", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "number crunching and fast iteration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 797626608, "item_id": 49851663, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851663", "by": "wildzzz", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools.", "excerpt": "I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly us", "context": "worked at enterprise engineering places", "use_case": "engineering tools and GUIs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"}, {"id": 797177105, "item_id": 49823569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823569", "by": "wvbdmp", "date": "2026-09-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Also, Excel\u2019s scrollbar is deranged in general.", "excerpt": "Interesting that shift+click to \u201cscroll here\u201d only came with Windows 7. Could have sworn it had always been there, I use it all the time. Infuriatingly, of all apps Microsoft Office doesn\u2019t implement this! It would be so useful there and it\u2019s Microsoft, but nope, you can\u2019t expect Office to respect Windows conventions. Also, Excel\u2019s scrollbar is deranged in general.", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"}, {"id": 795206145, "item_id": 49700384, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700384", "by": "lovich", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers", "excerpt": "I\u2019m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don\u2019t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it\u2019s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"}, {"id": 793404384, "item_id": 49587774, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49587774", "by": "lo0dot0", "date": "2026-09-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "still not as flawless as Excel", "excerpt": "Anecdotal evidence but when I used duckdb and Python and Pycharm the Pycharm table viewer was not working as well as Excel. The rendering was messed up. Could be related to the remote desktop rendering but still not as flawless as Excel. The patchwork of multiple software from different vendors needed to replace Excel with database plus viewer plus Code has downsides compared to the single app single file solution th", "context": "", "use_case": "viewing and working with tabular data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System"}, {"id": 793198080, "item_id": 49574880, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574880", "by": "TacticalCoder", "date": "2026-09-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "it's ultra-powerful stuff, but you basically have to be a programmer to understand what's doable", "excerpt": "> Spreadsheet formulas can refer to rectangular ranges of arbitrary size. When a user changes the structure of a referenced table, the spreadsheet system updates the references to refer to a new range. Unfortunately, this new range may differ from the user's expectations, introducing bugs in spreadsheets. We describe a user study showing that standard reference semantics are error-prone Yeah. It's a pet-peeve of mine", "context": "programmer", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System"}, {"id": 791836864, "item_id": 49489804, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489804", "by": "saevarom", "date": "2026-08-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "The count is added and checked in an Excel sheet", "excerpt": "I run the count at one of the constituencies. We have about 42.000 people on the electoral register and we'll probably see about 75-80% turnout, so we're going to be counting about 33.000 votes with about 30-35 people on staff, 24 of them doing the actual counting. For the interest of the HN crowd, here is the technical report: You'll find that the Icelandic voting system is very low tech. The electoral registry for ", "context": "runs the count at an Icelandic constituency", "use_case": "election vote counting and reporting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU"}, {"id": 791734400, "item_id": 49483400, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483400", "by": "preg_match", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned.", "excerpt": "Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro", "context": "", "use_case": "high-volume data entry", "switched_from": "", "story": "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"}, {"id": 790211616, "item_id": 49388226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388226", "by": "xeromal", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed", "excerpt": "Most of my family are small business owners, so I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed that generally take me a while to figure out. Landing pages and a few 3D designed prototypes that I used the Fusion 360 MCP server for", "context": "helps family who own small businesses", "use_case": "automations for family businesses", "switched_from": "", "story": "The August 17 outage, and the work ahead"}, {"id": 789577648, "item_id": 49348603, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348603", "by": "jedberg", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a tracking sheet created in excel", "excerpt": "I have to track daily data for an illness. What motivates me to stay on top of it are the insights gained from the tracking. Being able to go to the doctor and answer questions definitively instead of anecdotally. We've actually changed the therapy procedures based on the data and then been able to show it was effective with the data that came after. So think about the insights the tracking will provide you and your ", "context": "tracks daily data for an illness", "use_case": "printable illness tracking sheet", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Ive quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?"}, {"id": 788671953, "item_id": 49291997, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291997", "by": "twotwigs", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Excel for spreadsheets -_-", "excerpt": "We use Jira for PM -_- Excel for spreadsheets -_- And Slack for communications -_- Sometimes we use Google (yawn) Docs -_- \u201cI use Linux\u201d O_O", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"}, {"id": 788606945, "item_id": 49287934, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287934", "by": "eszed", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel is for the complicated stuff.", "excerpt": "Numbers is essential, because it understands dates, better handles CSV files, and doesn't corrupt long numeric UIDs. But, you're right: Excel is for the complicated stuff. I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data, and will never do any calculations with it. The financial folks are welcome to knock themselves out with their Excel wizardry. That separati", "context": "", "use_case": "complex calculations", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"}, {"id": 788579120, "item_id": 49286195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286195", "by": "tamimio", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "excel is a powerful tool but in nowadays tech it is outdated.", "excerpt": "It depends, excel is a powerful tool but in nowadays tech it is outdated. I remember years ago I used google sheet as a backend, it did the storing like a database, but also the auto web scrapping into that db after the filtration, everything was running on auto mode for free, and UI communicated through google API. Obviously nowadays it\u2019s not worth it with all these shiny tools out there.", "context": "", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"}, {"id": 787961569, "item_id": 49247598, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247598", "by": "wkirby", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "files that excel won't even open", "excerpt": "I've got a suite of CSVs that represent both edge case and performance issues, and I script timing opening/common operations using Apple Scripting. It's not perfect, but it gives us a sense if we're introducing back-breaking regressions. I try for our large files to test specifically with real-world, large data dumps from US government sources; I feel these are representative of actual large-CSV workloads. You can se", "context": "builds a native offline CSV app", "use_case": "opening large CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 786939762, "item_id": 49183735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183735", "by": "NarcisMirandes", "date": "2026-08-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a Excel file where I save and review the new words", "excerpt": "I have tried and it works well. I bookmark it to use it in next days. What I do now: I am in a small country in Europe and I use translations a lot, every day literally. I am in a Mac and I have a \"space\" dedicated to that with three things: - dictionary and Tesaurus. Free app in all Macs - translation. https://translate.google.com/ - a Excel file where I save and review the new words My first impressions: - Your too", "context": "lives in a small European country, uses translations daily", "use_case": "saving and reviewing vocabulary", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Vocab Top \u2013 AI-powered vocabulary builder that helps you retain words"}, {"id": 784449865, "item_id": 49028116, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028116", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026:", "excerpt": "Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026: Windows Server SQL Server .NET/C#/F#/Nuget Visual Studio [code] SSMS AAD/EntraID Defender DirectX Excel I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the p", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?"}, {"id": 781333888, "item_id": 48833368, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833368", "by": "pavel_lishin", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.", "excerpt": "I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the \"none\" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm no", "context": "", "use_case": "data analysis and presentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "The difference between \"today's task\" and \"accretive work\""}, {"id": 775283169, "item_id": 48455198, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455198", "by": "SdtEE", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel", "excerpt": "I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel, so I built a fast and lean viewer for CSV - at least this was what initially planned. Later I find the technique I developed to instantly load arbitrary large CSV files can be generalized to work with any format, with an incremental parser combinator. This means the tool can read from not only files, but any stream-oriented sources like a pipe. I did used", "context": "", "use_case": "opening CSV files", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 760919345, "item_id": 47557459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557459", "by": "jerkstate", "date": "2026-03-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel did the calculations. It was super easy", "excerpt": "I bought a copy of Office this year to do my taxes with the excel1040.com template and Claude for Excel, and dropped my 1099s and stuff into the chat window and Claude just transferred the numbers to the correct cells and Excel did the calculations. It was super easy (also easy to check because my tax picture didn\u2019t change much from last year). It got some things right that TurboTax always got wrong (like cost basis ", "context": "", "use_case": "tax calculation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Improving personal tax filing with Claude CLI and Obsidian"}, {"id": 756689200, "item_id": 47293075, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293075", "by": "star-glider", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter.", "excerpt": "I started my career in finance, and I used scroll lock constantly. When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter. Even today, my keyboard remap file swaps it with \"insert\" to put it in easier reach (it's also far less potentially destructive when pressed accidentally).", "context": "started career in finance", "use_case": "finance spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lock Scroll with a Vengeance"}, {"id": 753540768, "item_id": 47096298, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096298", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-02-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If the CFO is saying to use Excel, you use Excel.", "excerpt": "Using Microsoft or Google products for an office suite is generally a company decision. Where I work, we use Excel, and the rest of the MS Office suite. Any time we have interns I have to drill this into their head, as they continuously try and use Google Docs. This is a problem, because it can mean sensitive information goes to an untrusted server not bound by company security policies. It would also mean employees ", "context": "works at a company standardized on MS Office", "use_case": "company office suite", "switched_from": "", "story": "CFO says \"Everyone uses Excel, definitely not Sheets. Get over it\". True?"}, {"id": 750484928, "item_id": 46905308, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905308", "by": "belter", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...", "excerpt": "HN ignorance on display... The Journal of Accountancy - \"Bugged by Excel\u2019s calculation errors\" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-calculation-errors/ ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) \u2014 \"Rounding Errors Revisited\" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/excel-community-articles/2022/excel-tips-and-tricks-447 Just a reminder that an accountant w", "context": "", "use_case": "accounting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6"}, {"id": 749274832, "item_id": 46829677, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829677", "by": "arrsingh", "date": "2026-01-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used excel and wrote down all the tasks that needed to be done", "excerpt": "I actually did this (around 2006) after reading this article by Joel and I was skeptical but I used excel and wrote down all the tasks that needed to be done and kept breaking it down till each task was in hours. It took me a few hours to do and as Joel says in the article, it was not a fun thing to do (jumping right into code was more fun) but I stuck with it and did the whole thing. Then I followed that list of tas", "context": "", "use_case": "project scheduling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Joel Spolsky: Painless Software Schedules (2000)"}, {"id": 743180832, "item_id": 46448802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46448802", "by": "jimnotgym", "date": "2025-12-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Excel a lot", "excerpt": "I use Excel a lot, and run a team that use it more. One of biggest tips I give is to not write complex formulae if you can help it. Split it into more cells, so it goes step by step. It looks less cool, but when you have to edit it in 6 months you will thank me. It is not always possible, of course. But it normally is. For the edge cases a helper like this must be nice. Maybe some fields have lots of edge cases, mine", "context": "Runs a team that uses Excel heavily", "use_case": "spreadsheets for team", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Frockly \u2013 A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas"}, {"id": 741166160, "item_id": 46322885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322885", "by": "clwncr", "date": "2025-12-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use named ranges to semantically label relevant cells or ranges, and then use those labels in the formula.", "excerpt": "I use named ranges to semantically label relevant cells or ranges, and then use those labels in the formula. It's much easier to read and construct formulas when you don't have to think about where a value exists in the worksheet.", "context": "", "use_case": "readable formulas", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you deal with large, hard-to-read Excel formulas?"}, {"id": 739346400, "item_id": 46209150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209150", "by": "znpy", "date": "2025-12-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel in the hands of somebody that can actually use it is an incredibly powerful tool.", "excerpt": "It's undeniably cool. Years ago i became team leader and managed shifts for my team. I used an excel spreadsheet that some person from accounting made for us. It was incredibly featureful, visually instant (shifts were immediately understandable), it was ridiculously FAST to use. And through the cloud services was available to everybody in the team and outside. Developing something similar in any other programming la", "context": "team leader managing shifts", "use_case": "shift scheduling", "switched_from": "", "story": "54% of 22\u201332\u2011year\u2011old finance professionals \"love\" Excel"}, {"id": 738584752, "item_id": 46161547, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161547", "by": "antasvara", "date": "2025-12-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Excel really shines because it's designed for business.", "excerpt": "Just wanted to shout out the ability to copy, paste, and transpose the data using your mouse and keyboard. The ability to combine and reorganize data without needing to program is huge. It means you can grab data from an online source, paste your results into a report you're writing, quickly flip some data, etc. Other commenters have covered the major reasons Excel is so popular. But Excel really shines because it's ", "context": "R user", "use_case": "copying and reorganizing data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why we can\u2019t quit Excel"}, {"id": 735457811, "item_id": 45966113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45966113", "by": "edferda", "date": "2025-11-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "excel is slowly morphing into an unusable bloated behemoth", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Windows my entire life. In the past, I tried Linux without much success, switching back within a few weeks. However, Microsoft\u2019s software is just beyond bad these days. Simple actions take seconds, the UI/UX feels designed to make you waste time, and the fundamentals of what an OS should do feel broken. It\u2019s hard to overstate how bad quality has gotten. This motivated me to move to Linux and installed", "context": "lifelong Windows user, uses Windows at work", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders"}, {"id": 733203266, "item_id": 45825204, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825204", "by": "newscracker", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love spreadsheets.", "excerpt": "I feel what this article says based on some recent (non-catastrophic) experiences. I think I\u2019m probably an above average user when it comes to Excel skills. I love spreadsheets. But I struggle with formulas like index, match, vlookup/xlookup and many others, and even more so when it requires nesting one within another and coming up with the underlying logic that leads to some complex nested formulas. Over the past co", "context": "above average Excel user", "use_case": "spreadsheets", "switched_from": "", "story": "I\u2019m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel"}]}