Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.
Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 5 days ago
Just to give you two examples of stuff I used today:
Excel has PowerQuery, which is a really fancy and nice way of importing data into your spreadsheet. You can import data from another spreadsheet, from an CSV, a database or from websites and update them with one click. You can also transform that data during import. So if you want to just use two columns of that spreadsheet from accounting, you can import them in the format you need. And if accounting updates their spreadsheet, you can update yours with one click. LibreOffice doesn’t have this as far as I know with that power.
The other one is simply plugins for nearly every other business system in the world. I have this nice BI plugin which gives me a pivot table of our sales data. So if I want to know how my revenue was yesterday, I can update my spreadsheet with one click. I can also jack into our CRM and get f.e. visit data from our sales reps.
So in this case I can take some data that is sitting somewhere on the company drive, import & transform it and then mash it up with sales data from BI and CRM. So building a quick report like “which accounts were created last year and have no sales and have no visit from sales reps” is quite easy. And if I want I can also set this up to create this with PowerQuery & Co so that I can do this report monthly/weekly without having to copy & paste data every time. That’s not really possible with LibreOffice right now.
There will be comments that this is not a job for Excel and that you should use Python/SQL queries/whatever for that task, but Excel is what most companies have. I could do it with Python, but it is not installed on my business computer and people are used to Excel and are not trained in Python. There is a reason why businesses are using Excel for everything and that is because it is easy, quick and gets shit done