Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.
Just look what they’re doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM… Kill all your main characters.
Forget Xbox, look at how they’re treating Windows lately. Loaded with ads and bloat, forced hardware upgrades with Win11, forced MS account sign-in with no option for local accounts unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…
You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
Apparently my Microsoft account is some bullshit one I made for Xbox in 2006 and it thinks I’m a made up name from that time, which is pretty funny to me literally everytime I reset my PC … Which because I use win 11 is way more often than it should be
I’m on Win11 and see almost none of the issues people like you are talking about. No doubt they exist! Maybe it’s because I’m on a plain vanilla ISO and I stripped the crap out early on? Same SSD I had 4 computers ago on Win10, just get moving it over. Talk like yours makes me afraid of a fresh install!
If it’s as bad as people say, I’ll give up and go Debian. I was largely staying Windows so I could be familiar and support my coworkers. Unemployed now. Who cares?
They’ve since relaxed a bit on the forced hardware upgrade part; you can install Win11 on ‘unsupported’ hardware now, you’ll just have click a prompt saying you’ll get no support and you’re on your own if you attempt that, where initially it wouldn’t even let you do that.
The forced MS account login is very much an issue with the consumer SKUs and the Enterprise/IoT SKUs still let you use a local account. Similarly, LTSC in particular is barren on the bloat front, while the consumer SKUs and even the non-LTSC Enterprise and IoT SKUs aren’t much better in this regard, come loaded with bloat.
How is adding new features that you don’t have to use but which can be insanely powerful “fucking with it”?
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that’s wrong sometimes.
AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often
I’ve never seen a calculator being wrong, and I’m genuinely curious what you’re talking about.
That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.
Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.
If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.
Now, that’s a fine hair to be splitting.
this one is just wrongerer
Some computer scientists really went “we made a computer that is programmed in a different way and is sometimes correct” and these idiot corpos went “wow put it in everything”
Excel is such an incredible piece of shit. There’s many reasons to hate it for me, but what i hate the most is not being able to do relationships in any meaningful way. So often i need to have one to many relationships and this garbage makes it impossible. Data consistency? Nope. Opening a csv? Fuck you! Why the fuck are there online tools that are better at this shit? You had 40 years ffs. No amount of AI is going to fix this turd. God I hate Excel.
With power query, Excel can perform more database-like functions, I use it all the time! It comes with it’s own quirks however
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
Brian, I’m gonna be honest with you: That smells like pure gasoline.
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why ‘copilot in excel’ (not agent mode) wasn’t designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn’t designed for it.
54% isn’t really low when people only get 72%.
Everyone else who’s anti-AI:
- What is that smell? It smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food!
- What is that?! It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!
- It smells like Bigfoot’s dick!
