It’s just a generic table thing mostly. Turns out tables are a good way to lay out a bunch of different information.
Somehow nobody has made a similar generic application to allow you to work with nested list, outline, or tree style structures, which I think are equally if not more useful structures to lay out certain types of information.
pycorax@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Tables isn’t what make Excel or it’s alternatives excel at tasks. If that’s all it were, it’d be easily replaced. The formulas and all the other features that help you format, arrange and represent that data is what really makes it good.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
I remember in college we would use it to run Monte Carlo simulations, which I thought was cool.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
It’s not 100% of it, but it’s a large portion.
Excel isn’t replaced because your company already bought it. There are many alternatives to Excel and most of them are acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people who use Excel (people using it for tables and basic graphs) and none of them have displaced Excel.
I mean look at Word. It absolutely sucks and yet it’s standard anyway. Same with Outlook.
pycorax@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Hence why I mentioned Excel or it’s alternatives. I was responding to you referring to spreadsheet software as a simple matrix.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I wasn’t saying that’s all it is. I was and am saying that that’s why and how a large portion of people use it.
There is a lot of usefulness in simple data structures with a GUI over top. People–especially in software product management–constantly think the complicated features are what keep people using software, even when it’s obviously untrue.