this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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It's the cost of installing Linux. 🤷
Janette in finance is going to murder whoever tries to give her a FOSS alternative to Excel or forces her to fuck with a VM or web Excel.
We remember the last IT admin that tried to do a platform swap on her. RIP Patrick.
As someone who uses Excel on Windows and Calc on Linux, I can totally understand. There are some big differences so there’s a valid reason for sticking with Excel. Casual users won’t notice anything big, but advanced users will.
On the other hand, if you’re an advanced Excel user, it usually means you’re trying to make it do stuff that it isn’t very good at. If you want stuff that Calc can’t provide, it’s a clear sign you should have written that calculation in R or Python a long time ago.
And honestly, I've been using Excel for work stuff a lot lately (no OO or I'd use that) and it fucks up a lot and in maddening ways. Click a cell at the bottom of your multi-page sheet "Oh, you must have been trying to click A5 so I'm going to scroll way the fuck up here"
Copy-paste from other (even MS) apps also sometimes does weird shit
Oh, it certainly has infuriating quirks. Like, if you copy a cell from here and you plan to paste it into 15 different places here and there. Somewhere along the way, you’ll accidentally add some text to another cell, and you lose the content of the clipboard. You need to copy that thing a second time in order to keep on pasting in the remaining places. Like, why is this a feature? Editing one cell suddenly kicks out whatever you had copied earlier? Why?
Fortunately, Calc still has a sensible clipboard that actually remembers what you put there.
I really wish there was a more sensible path from WYSIWYG sheets to full programing language and database. Heck even better find a way to make calculation description procs that can be ran as separate functions for better scalability
LabVIEW pulls off visual programming pretty gracefully. It feels like, it’s written by, and for, electrical engineers, so if you’re not familiar with circuit diagrams, it’s going to take a while to wrap your head around it. However, it proves to me that programming can look very different too. Let’s just hope that eventually someone does something similar to matrices, dataframes etc.