Legom7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have a job that involves working with spreadsheets. I have Librecalc at home and both Libre and MSOffice at work. I have also had a college course about using Excel specifically. Both really can do mostly the same things but because MS does everything in a specific (backwards) way, people trained on MS who are not otherwise “computer people” can’t cope with needing to unlearn and relearn. So the end result is paraprofessionals are locked in.
LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I’ve gone full circle
Loved sheets, then hated them because we should just use a DB
Now I do stuff in sheets with a tab explaining how I got the data because I can email it to someone and in 4 months it still answers their questions.
LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I used sheets because it was portable and flexible, but now I’d almost always just use a db instead.
My main use for excel now is “I need to send data to someone who isn’t a programmer” and doing json > CSV conversions to see if my 3000 rows of data from a 3rd party have all the necessary bits.