Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel.
Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.
That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.
Excel is programming. It's just not the kind you do or like. The number of programming things people have done in Excel and Access is astounding, as is the number of people who've learned to program without realizing it as a result of using those tools.
Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would lead to saner results or fewer errors. I would certainly prefer python and org mode to excel and word, thought.
Although it's a nice thought, the benefit of excel is it's comparatively low barrier-to-entry, ubiquity and transparency (in terms of other people being able to understand how a calculation was derived).
It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.
Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
> People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming.
I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.
Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer?
COM and VBA scripting?
Access database sourcing?
Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).
It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.
All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)"
I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
> I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features.
PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.
> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.
Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
> Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.
> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.
I hear this argument a lot and I still don't buy it. I use more advanced functionality than 90% of my coleagues and I don't find google spreadsheet stops me in any way.
Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.
If you're using excel as a programming interface it's going to be hard to dig out of that. Of course, one could argue that excel was never a good place for that sort of thing in the first place.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're a LaTeX user, your needs are specialized beyond what the average office worker needs out of a word processor. Point taken though.
What can it not do that office can do?