Excel never dies (2021)
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It&#x27;s what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you.<p>I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. (I was using Google Sheets, but I don&#x27;t think Excel would have been much different). For example, it is very non-intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all the rows in another sheet that match this rule, and once you do that, since it&#x27;s a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.<p>I realize most people don&#x27;t have the luxury or skills, but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet.<p>After this experience, I can&#x27;t help but wonder if Excel and spreadsheets largely exist due to pre-existing knowledge about how to use them, or if this is _actually_ the best way for non-programming minded people to solve these problems.