Excel
Financial forecasting and modeling, accounting, budgeting, and any business process where human-readable formulas matter. VBA macros enable powerful in-house automation. The universal language for sharing financial data — if it needs to be understood by anyone in business, use Excel.
Still the default language of business — accounting, forecasting, and anything that needs to be shared with non-technical stakeholders. Its functional programming model (pure declarative DSL) makes it genuinely powerful for the right use cases. Gets replaced by Python/BI tools when complexity grows.
Complex data pipelines and analytics at scale — Python and BI tools are significantly more powerful. The Ribbon UI slows down power users. Bank statement CSV imports are painful with inconsistent formats. Becomes a maintenance nightmare as a core business system.
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FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets”
POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“Excel is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and one of the very few they haven't turned into slop YET”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“too many inconsistent "source to target mapping specs" (usually Excel files) in integration and data projects in my life. They're too opaque for AI coding tools to get consistent results”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“Mi experiencia con Excel con las fórmulas en español no puede ser más decepcionante”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-26
“now it can poke about in the big Excel file directly with SheetJS to pull the sheets/headers and inspect the shape of the data”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-14
“Most quantitative research goes through "lossy" steps between raw data and final results involving Excel spreadsheets, one-off MATLAB commands, copy pasting the results, etc. In a lot of cases (where data is being collected by humans with a tape measure, say) there is room for error.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-04-20
“not having VBA and other aspects of excel would be a non-starter”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-19
“Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-04-15
“keeping the "truth" in a pretty tight Excel model with clear input tabs”
POSITIVE · reliability · Reddit · 2026-04-12
“web server hosted in Excel VBA' illustrate the magnitude of horrors that can emerge in these situations”
NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-10
“Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.”
LUKEWARM · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-04
“never open it in Excel unless you are prepared for your data to be silently broken, but that's Excel being abhorrent”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-03-03
“I started tracking everything in an Excel sheet, but it was tedious.”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-03
“the executives who were highly effective all just paid for excel themselves”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-25
“I still run Excel 2007 because as long as it can read and write .xlsx files that my Mathematica models can ingest and output I'm good with that.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-24
“Are people more productive with the Excel of today than with Excel 2003/2007? I'm not.”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-24
“Excel was way quicker to start than on a modern PC running Win 11 with an SSD”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-22
“With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand.”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-21
“connect to various data sources in Excel I would have requested a MacBook at work years ago.”
NEGATIVE · integration · Hacker News · 2026-02-05
“I don't sleep well at night knowing how many very very essential things are running on top of Excel sheets passed down like stories around a campfire.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-02-03
“With the addition of lambdas Excel formulae are Turing complete. no more need for VBA in a (mostly) functional environment.”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-02
“smart analysts burning out because they were treating Excel like a database (merging cells, manual coloring, VLOOKUP chains)”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-01-05
“I wrote some surprisingly complex interfaces for online services in Excel”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-01
“I was tired of spending hours in Excel/PowerBI just to visualize simple CSV data”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-27
“Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-20
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