Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
In what way? I use it a lot and feel like it’s still on par with the older versions. It’s got some annoying “Microsoft-y” things typical to them from the last 10 years or so but I think the core functionality is still intact.
I think it’s mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can’t use Edge for that link, I’m not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
because of retarded decisions like that
“Retarded”, really? JFC what is this, 2001?
The definition of “retardation” is as follows:
- The act or process of delaying or impeding.
- The condition of being delayed or impeded.
- The extent to which something is held back or delayed.
Considering that the features being complained about impede the user, calling those features “retarded” is an adequate description.
It is also in-fitting with the definition of lacking of intellectual development; as mentioned, other programs do not feature such impediments, and in the case of Office 365, may actually be a regression of features.
Retard has transitioned from an impartial term to one that is negatively loaded. For this reason, the term is now widely considered as degrading even when used in its original context.[10]
Much like today’s socially acceptable terms idiot and moron, which are also defined as some sort of mental disability, when the term retard is being used in its pejorative form, it is usually not being directed at people with mental disabilities. Instead, people use the term when teasing their friends or as a general insult.[11]
Do you think people who have the condition of mental retardation experience bigotry in our society? Are you not aware “retarded” has been used extensively as a slur? And are you so inconvenienced you can’t come up with a single less-problematic synonym?
Yes I am aware that retard has been used as a slur… Against those that don’t have any reason to behave like a retard.
I do not see any issue.
Caveat emptor ESL here but, while that’s true, wouldn’t under those terms “retarding” be a much better fit?
Yes the decision isn’t retarded, it was made fast enough. The consequence is retarding though.
because of retarded decisions like that
You know you could have just used shitty instead of using a slur, which would have the same emphasis without the baggage of the other word.
If you really felt it necessary to offer a synonym, you could have said “backward” … because that’s what the word actually means
Seriously, wtf is wrong with this website? I saw this again just this week. Next I know these a holes will be going around calling things gay. "WeLl AlShUlLy ThE dEfInItIoN Of GaY iS HaPpY sO… "
Shitty has a different meaning. Above commenter meant to say the person making the decision was differently abled with regards their cognitive capabilities. The other is excrement.
Idiot. Moron. Imbecile. All words used as retarded before it. 🤷♂️
FYI you can change that in settings to launch the systems default browser. Extra steps yes, but the option is there.
You’re probably at the wrong job then.
What’s the percentage of people who work with their degree and not a random McDonalds
Depends on the field
Python and Excel should be buff wojaks with brainlette heads, they get the work done but ughhhhh to using them.
Garbage software is one of the primary reasons I left my last job despite high pay. It just got too friggin annoying to use. They’d roll out a ‘hotfix’ to fix something they had broken 3 months earlier and they’d break 2 new things which previously had been working fine for years. The support was so bad I just bought a magic eight ball for our office and we’d ask it our support questions.
Yardi, I’m looking at you.
Damn, I really dodged a bullet there… by them rejecting my application.
I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I’ve seen some black magic shit.
Used for the right purposes, Excel is an extremely versatile and powerful piece of software. Is use it all the time for analyzing complex financial data and turning pivot tables into really nice looking reports. I can use VBA behind the scenes to change report scenarios while preserving the formatting. Excel is great for things like that.
It’s easy to get Into trouble though because eventually someone decides to keep a bunch of auxiliary – yet somehow very important – data in a spreadsheet. Before you know it, multiple people are being asked to maintain said data and then POOF! You now have a spreadsheet functioning as a database. It’s all downhill from there.
When you know Excel really well, it’s like Legos for data. If you’ve got the imagination, intuition, and patience, you can make some incredible stuff.
And between knowing Excel like you’ve described and knowing only the basics exists an uncanny valley of being able to create some truly revolting abominations. Additionally when all you know is Excel, every problem becomes a spreadsheet, for better or for worse (usually the latter).
Program management system for the entire division? Excel. “Agile” task tracker? Excel. Requirements manager? Oh no no, that one’s written in a word document with no version control. I have trauma. Use tools made for the thing you want to do, please.
Yeah, I appreciate that, and it’s really annoying. But it is still remarkable how Excel can pull off all of those abominations while having such a comparatively low skill floor.
Like Legos. Accessible, simple, capable of building a lot of things, but you’d obviously be better served making a house out of actual building materials.
This user:
“Don’t worry I’m learning Power BI so I won’t have to use Excel for everything soon.”
Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.
Excel masters wish the downloaded an ide a just coded all those tools the have to support now.
This is one of my favorites to share. It’s a 3D engine with raytracing with no VBA scripting - all of the calculations are done internally with spreadsheet math.
Yeah, but then again, those are the people that tie companies to Microsoft and, *gestures broadly at Windows and M365* enabled MS to do whatever they want to the market without paying dinner first.
Yeah, but it’s the kind of black magic where you accidentally summon Cthulhu and only notice it, after he destroyed half of the city.
Capitalism somehow means managers know better than you how STEM work should be done. Sigh… get used to it if you want to continue.:-| Make some FOSS on the side for fun?:-)
I use mainly python at work, but usually exit to excel to share the results to other people.
Openpyxl is for you.
I use Pandas, but im sure i have that library installed for Pandas use.
I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can’t say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Saying you mastered excel is like saying you mastered meth
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can’t tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace “New” Outlook is.
For Microsoft, “Modern, sleek, streamlined” are just marketing terms for “We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you’ll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development.”
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn’t reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don’t want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there’s probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can’t exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
Those are different categories of problems.
Excel really does too much. Biologists literally renamed a genom because Excel kept turning it into a date. If any other database did that, the vendor would hear a friendly but stern “get fucked”.
They’re using a spreadsheet and getting burned when it acts like a spreadsheet. It’s one complaining that a screwdriver did a bad job hammering nails.
Yeah, that’s my point. Excel is almost never the right tool, but since it’s doing so much, it can be used for almost anything, just in a very shitty manner. And in reality, it is used for almost anything.
Outlook really has a lot of obscure features that not many people used. I think it’s good for them to cull these less used features and later re-add them rewritten in a more supportable manner.
I also really appreciate the emoji-reactions because I don’t have to type out a response expressing that I have read and acknowledge an email, I can just give it a thumbs up and move on, and they don’t receive a whole email to read, they just see that it got a thumbs up and can move on too
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
What do Excel and Incels have in common?
They assume everything is a date.
You can turn that off now.
How about an Excel with Python scripting? That would be awesome.
Not sure if you’re joking, but that’s a thing. You can just insert python scripts into a cell and have their return values be the cell value.
Python in Excel requires Internet access because calculations run on remote servers in the Microsoft Cloud. The calculations are not run by your local Excel application.
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve and incredible amount of credit for. It’s one of the most invaluable tools around.
Shame you can’t just buy it.
You can. It’s expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.
I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don’t need PowerPoint or a word processor, I’d rather it not be included in the price at all.
Also, they’ve made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that’s the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that’s a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
I once saw a post on reddit where a bored guy in his office stream movies from his home PC to Excel.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don’t get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it’s still in use, but yeah.“Only a trainee…”
Sounds like you’re the only one keeping that thing running. Don’t sell yourself short!
my boss does appreciate what i’m doing but i just don’t have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
Until it has an odbc connection to a sql server or access db it’s still low level wizardry.
you can access sql from excel? i am now officially horrified.
Next time you open excel go to the data tab and look at all the things it can do.
It really shouldn’t do those things, but it can.
well excel IS a database
It’s turning complete, so it’s should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I’m not sure, if it’s autocorrect or misinformation, but it’s “Turing complete”, after Alan Turing.
It’s as in once you try it there is no turning back
I did computer science, and we used MIPS Assembly…
I ask you, when has anyone EVER wanted to use a MIPS processor lol.
Also, for AI, we were forced to use LISP, which the lecturer didn’t teach. He graded us using a poorly written script, and if your program crashed his script, he gave you 0. You only got 1 attempt.
If you dont understand why the specific instruction set you studied isnt the point you should maybe po back to school.
Snarky but true. MIPS actually is common in network equipment. It’s niche, but not completely unused. Also, it’s really an excellent instruction set for teaching.
That is true… However, I guess I’m a bit salty we didn’t do ARM instead
That being said, admittedly, I’ve never used assembly again anyway lol (except once, for reverse engineering something)
Mobile phones like the N97 were already using ARM… Whilst it might have been about learning the algorithms, one could argue considering the cost of university that we should at least get taught on the best platform (obviously RISC based in this case).
One could make the same argument about anything though. I could argue they shouldn’t have even taught X86 architecture, and taught TempleOS instead of Unix Tools (after all, it’s NOT the point). The point is to learn, but it is also to avoid double learning AFTER uni too.
I will give them props for at least teaching us OpenGL at the time instead of Glide (that was a good decision).
MIPS is RISC type and more open that x86 or ARM. I guess this is why they teach it. Also I heard that some universities/schools starts teaching RISC-V more and more because of just that.
I dynamic for crm, SQL
Business apps at work? Shocking!
I’m in university and I use both…
I use python occasionally at work.
… Not IT approved, but well… we use an MSP, and I get to be a decision maker in the company for certain things, and just do it, because well… I can, and the company keeps me around partially for the things I do with python and sql.
I would like to say Pandas should be used for much of that excel stuff, maybe even replace it, but… Microsoft has decided to bring Python capabilities into excel, so that will likely cement them in your workflow even further:
I’ve found the selling point in not needing to open excel and click around to run the script. So often people need to do like the same three things and don’t even know how to write Python, so giving them a script to drag your file onto is a step up from excel
Me: oracle, oracle and more oracle
Damnit, who put a maze with no exits in this cage?
There’s a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
I hate power automate so so so much
Why?
The licensing process is very confusing for starters.
I guess I’m so used to thinking in code, and power automate seems hell-bent on being aimed at More business oriented folks. I find it extremely unintuitive, and downright hostile in terms of actually getting something done that I know how to do, but I’m not allowed to.
100%. Power automate doing anything other than the templates they have is almost always harder than just writing python
That’s why I use Powershell with the Graph API module. Of course running scripts is probably disabled for non admins.
Power automate has so much potential and promise, but it just sucks to implement anything more than built in templates.
