despite all my rage IT keeps me trapped like a rat in a cage.

I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can't say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
- Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
  Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
  
  i heard you like a little database in your excel
  
  Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
  Including running a 3D graphics engine... with raytracing
  
  It's turning complete, so it's should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
- As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It's one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
  Shame you can't just buy it.
  
  You can. It's expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.
- Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
  I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
  
  You can turn that off now.
  
  What do Excel and Incels have in common?
  They assume everything is a date.
  
  How about an Excel with Python scripting? That would be awesome.
- Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
  
  I can't tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace "New" Outlook is.
  For Microsoft, "Modern, sleek, streamlined" are just marketing terms for "We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you'll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development."
- I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
- PowerPoint is actually ridiculously powerful software
- Saying you mastered excel is like saying you mastered meth
- I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.

I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I've seen some black magic shit.
- When you know Excel really well, it's like Legos for data. If you've got the imagination, intuition, and patience, you can make some incredible stuff.
  
  And between knowing Excel like you've described and knowing only the basics exists an uncanny valley of being able to create some truly revolting abominations. Additionally when all you know is Excel, every problem becomes a spreadsheet, for better or for worse (usually the latter).
- Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.
  
  Excel masters wish the downloaded an ide a just coded all those tools the have to support now.
- This is one of my favorites to share. It's a 3D engine with raytracing with no VBA scripting - all of the calculations are done internally with spreadsheet math.
- Used for the right purposes, Excel is an extremely versatile and powerful piece of software. Is use it all the time for analyzing complex financial data and turning pivot tables into really nice looking reports. I can use VBA behind the scenes to change report scenarios while preserving the formatting. Excel is great for things like that.
  It's easy to get Into trouble though because eventually someone decides to keep a bunch of auxiliary -- yet somehow very important -- data in a spreadsheet. Before you know it, multiple people are being asked to maintain said data and then POOF! You now have a spreadsheet functioning as a database. It's all downhill from there.
- Yeah, but it's the kind of black magic where you accidentally summon Cthulhu and only notice it, after he destroyed half of the city.

Excel is a powerful tool. I was solving system of differential equations with Newton method in it. Sometimes it is easier than in Matlab (or Mathematica) if all you have is good understanding of how step-wise equations should look like, but not the differential equations themselves. Those steps may include if statements, for example.
- Had to do a similar project and it took me three full days of back and forth with another software before I found out EXCEL rounds small numbers in very weird ways.
  Also, in EXCEL functions/formulas and data/values are wildly mixed.
  (Not mentioning a plethora of other mildly infuriating quirks here)
- What does it do that LibreOffice Calc doesn't do?
  
  Smooth scrolling.
  Kind of serious, the lack of smooth scrolling makes Calc really horrible to use on a touchpad or with large/differing sized cells (formatted sheets with headers and such)
  
  Almost nothing, considering Calc is a clone. I don't think people are excluding LibreOffice from the list of smooth brain apps.
  
  Not lagging horribly with big tables after calculating a simple formula? That's the only thing i can think of. Everything else is just very similar
  
  Embed objects and query spaces from other Microsoft products, mainly.
  It's a circular argument that all of the corporate world is too heavily invested in to change.
  
  Does libre office do pivot charts?
- Call me crazy, but the admittance matrix hw (Gaussian, G-S, Newton, N-R, etc.) I did last semester was much more intuitive for me on MATLAB than on Excel... but I'm gonna get screwed for that because a vast majority of companies would never bother to pay for MATLAB (+ Toolboxes) licenses.
  
  There is always Octave.
  And I am not claiming that Excel is better than Matlab. There are lots of tasks where Matlab is better, or where it is not even possible to use Excel with any efficiency. And yet, Excel IS a powerful tool for scientists and engineers. Not just for accountants.
  
  We have a single licence for matlab installed on an old laptop in the lab. I find it easier to program in Excel than try to reserve the laptop and go to the office (sometimes you reserve it and after arriving you find out that the last guy never returned it so you spend extra time trying to find where it is or who has it)
- Matlab excels at dgls, Excel does math not. Newton method isn't it

Dude, I'm a surgical tech - my job is to stand in an OR and be a surgeon's bitch while we're flaying some fucker open. ...and I still spend what feels like 90% of my day on Outlook -_-
- I think you're supposed to Inlook during surgery.
  
  ERMAHGERD! I fucking love torturing my coworkers with medical dadjokes. I am bookmarking this in my brain, and will steal it when the opportunity presents.
  The groans and facepalms will be glorious!

Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
- I think it's mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can't use Edge for that link, I'm not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
  
  FYI you can change that in settings to launch the systems default browser. Extra steps yes, but the option is there.
  
  because of retarded decisions like that
  You know you could have just used shitty instead of using a slur, which would have the same emphasis without the baggage of the other word.
  
  because of retarded decisions like that
  "Retarded", really? JFC what is this, 2001?
- In what way? I use it a lot and feel like it's still on par with the older versions. It's got some annoying "Microsoft-y" things typical to them from the last 10 years or so but I think the core functionality is still intact.

The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can't unsee it.
- why did you have to say this
- Thanks! I can't unsee it but I like it more now 😆
- Nope I'm not seeing it personally.

Don't forget LaTeX!
- Self-flagilation is a little far for me.
  
  Once your over the hump, it's a pleasure to use relative to word. Especially if your document gets large or has lots of maths in it.
  
  How can you say that with a straight face when you like Matlab?
- i love compiler errors in my documentation
- Please forget LaTeX. Please let us adopt a more modern alternative that isn’t absolutely painful to use.
  
  And yet MATLAB is still on the list 😹
  
  I suggest locking your doors, a very angry crowd is likely to arrive shortly
  
  I'm all ears.
  
  It's just different use cases. A quick one pager such as memo, summary, short review, etc can all be done in a simple word processor.
  Anything thesis-like or scientific, definitely LaTeX. What needs to die is slides in LaTeX however. That is definitely outdated and so restricted. Even libre office PowerPoint is better. But again, the power of math syntax is strong here. You're very likely to see that ugly beamer format in CS and math classes.
  I don't get why people need to be in camps. Just use...both?

Being a SOLIDWORKS customer is exactly the same as being a rat in a cage. They are the most aggressively evil I’ve ever experienced. Adobe etc not even close
- I have to use solidworks at work. God, do I miss Creo.
  
  I used Creo for about 5 years at a previous job but I never knew the cost. How does it compare?
- Yeah I wanted to comment on this too. It's a win for ms against dassault every time
- What are some examples? What makes them so much more evil than Adobe?
- Not that bad when you sail the high seas
  
  I’ve known people that had authorities show up from that btw

Garbage software is one of the primary reasons I left my last job despite high pay. It just got too friggin annoying to use. They'd roll out a 'hotfix' to fix something they had broken 3 months earlier and they'd break 2 new things which previously had been working fine for years. The support was so bad I just bought a magic eight ball for our office and we'd ask it our support questions.
Yardi, I'm looking at you.
- Damn, I really dodged a bullet there... by them rejecting my application.

matlab
- Octave works as a great replacement
  
  Octave 💪💻!!

The Ribbon interface used on office products isn't there because it's good UX. It exists because there's a software patent on it.
If office didn't use a patented UI, someone could make office software that replicated the UI of MS Office which would allow companies to switch to other products without having to retrain staff.
Microsoft was enshittifying their software long before anyone else.
- I did an internship where I was creating a prototype UI for a Windows application, and used the ribbon API to build it. I thought it was a well thought out design, and was definitely an improvement over nested menus. A problem I've seen come up a lot though is shitty implementations where the pattern wasn't followed correctly making it really hard to find things because the developers put items in dumb places.
  
  Generally in UX you want often used buttons to always be in the same place to take advantage of muscle memory. Text is more intuitive than an icon, but an icon will use less screenspace, so once the user learns the icon, you can have an interface that's more user friendly (though less intuitive) so that's fine. Small amount of experience or training needed with the softwareresults in more buttons available at all times, so it's worth the trade off to use one button bar. Less used items should be put into a menu because a) it's not used often so it's fine to be hidden away unless needed and b) it's not used often so the user isn't going to be familiar with an icon so text is preferable.
  The ribbon is some weird combination between a menu and a bar with buttons on it. So all of the disadvantages of menu (buttons aren't always on the screen) and all of the disadvantages of button panel (icons that have to be learned for nearly every single feature). The advantages of being able to access the most used features from muscle memory is lost, the advantage of being able to discover lesser used features by simply reading text is lost.
  It's just indecisive design. Not putting any thought about how the user actually uses the software, Just chuck some buttons onto a ribbon somewhere, make a pretty icon so it looks good and let the user click on various ribbons an click on random pretty buttons until they find the button that adds an attachment to an email in outlook. But when they find that button, make sure we default to OneDrive instead of the Documents folder because pushing cloud storage is currently the top priority as MS.
  Sorry... bit of a rant there. But yeah, just put thought into which features will be used most often make them to be the buttons on the bar, put everything else into a menu. Worst case is the user has to click two things to use a feature, which is the same as using ribbons. Best case the user is clicking the same button they've clicked 100 times before and it's in the exact same place as when they clicked it all of those times before.
  Ribbons are just a crime against UX.
- I can't use the new MS Office with butchered menu. LibreOffice is more similar to the classic MS Office than MS Office itself.
  
  Oh I hear ya. I have to use MS Office at work, and it's so frustrating. Constant game of "where the fuck did the button go?"
- It is good UX though. I remember the switch to the ribbon UI in 2007. It was a huge improvement over the toolbar in Office 2003 once you overcame the muscle memory inertia.
- If it wasn't good UX why would other companies want to replicate it? Also, design parents don't last all that long, Ribbon has been around since MS Office 2007, which means it would be at the longest recently out of patent coverage.
  
  If it wasn’t good UX why would other companies want to replicate it?
  That question actually answers itself. Because managers of companies use the exact logic you're using. "If big company X is doing this thing, they must have a good reason, so we do the same thing."
  MS constantly fails at basic UX. It's not the company anyone should follow when doing UX. But there's a lot of people that don't know what they're doing and just copy someone else hoping they know what they're doing.
- No matter where you stand on your views of the ribbon, Microsoft introduced it in what, 2007? The patent is gonna expire soon.
- If it's patented, how can Sibelius use it in their software?
  
  I used the ribbon API when building a C# GUI. It's just part of the Microsoft application framework. Maybe they prevent other frameworks from using it? Underneath the fancy paint there's not really much to it though, it's just adding a tab bar to a tool bar.
  
  It's been a long time since the ribbon came out. It's possibly expired. If not, a company can enter into a license agreement to use patented technology.

TBF if you're professionally using MATLAB you're like, sending people to space or modeling atmospheres. Which I guess some of you might do haha.
- I’ve used it to simulate things for mechanisms and motors etc for mechanical engineering

MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.
- I want to love Julia so much, but it's always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again...
- Yep, that hole on the head is perfectly representative.
- If you don't like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It's for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn't appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.
  
  I am 100% the target audience, have worked on multiple teams that did their 6DOF models in Matlab for GNC and orbital dynamics stuff.
  I still think simulink is absolutely terrible. It makes certain things a lot easier to implement but the Git implementation is very nearly useless.

There's a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
- I hate power automate so so so much
  
  Why?
- I was going to say: the office environment doesn't suck that much, or rather it's not aimed at people with advanced programing knowledge. Rather everyone else (which is probably the majority in the professional world).
  For people who have no or little IT knowledge it's actually very handy.
  I've learned a little bit of programming during my studies (mostly R) and I'm now working in a big company.
  Power automate is so useful and nearly ALL parts of the office ecosystem is accessible to it. And it's possible to use it with very little coding knowledge.
  It's now my main tool of work (with excel).

You're probably at the wrong job then.
- I think it's around 40% on average. Source: some random number I may or may not be misremembering from some article I've read months ago
  
  Depends on the field

Solidworks, Matlab is not exactly what you call CHAD open-source tech as opposed to Python where you can get shit done with it.

Me: oracle, oracle and more oracle
Damnit, who put a maze with no exits in this cage?

Maybe you need a career shift bud. As a designer you could absolutely use those softwares!

You didn't use any office apps during your time in school?
- I use markdown and convert it to everything else. Using 360 products is painful, but I do what I have to only when I have to.
- For English essays. That's about the size of that.
- Yeah, these are two completely different toolsets. Dude ever write a paper or send an email?

a favorite to share: You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky
- Thank you!
- I feel like I had barely encountered spreadsheets before my dad threw me in the deep end with SQL at age 13. I did not learn it well and now have a semester of database design as well, but I'd say I'm about as good at both? idk :( I'm pretty bad at both unless I compare myself to someone without a CS degree.

I use mainly python at work, but usually exit to excel to share the results to other people.
- Openpyxl is for you.
  
  I use Pandas, but im sure i have that library installed for Pandas use.

Python and Excel should be buff wojaks with brainlette heads, they get the work done but ughhhhh to using them.

Engineer in uni vs engineering job?

They missed using Access incorrectly with too many users and too large of a database.

Capitalism somehow means managers know better than you how STEM work should be done. Sigh... get used to it if you want to continue.:-| Make some FOSS on the side for fun?:-)

I did computer science, and we used MIPS Assembly..
I ask you, when has anyone EVER wanted to use a MIPS processor lol.
Also, for AI, we were forced to use LISP, which the lecturer didn't teach. He graded us using a poorly written script, and if your program crashed his script, he gave you 0. You only got 1 attempt. But, when is the last time, ANYONE has used LISP either lol
And Perl.. And PHP, etc
- MIPS is RISC type and more open that x86 or ARM. I guess this is why they teach it. Also I heard that some universities/schools starts teaching RISC-V more and more because of just that.
- If you dont understand why the specific instruction set you studied isnt the point you should maybe po back to school.
  
  Snarky but true. MIPS actually is common in network equipment. It's niche, but not completely unused. Also, it's really an excellent instruction set for teaching.
  
  Mobile phones like the N97 were already using ARM.. Whilst it might have been about learning the algorithms, one could argue considering the cost of university that we should at least get taught on the best platform (obviously RISC based in this case).
  One could make the same argument about anything though. I could argue they shouldn't have even taught X86 architecture, and taught TempleOS instead of Unix Tools (after all, it's NOT the point). The point is to learn, but it is also to avoid double learning AFTER uni too.
  I will give them props for at least teaching us OpenGL at the time instead of Glide (that was a good decision).
- PHP is pretty cool if you know what you're doing and use its modern, object-oriented features. It's also very easy to write horrendous spaghetti code with it, which is what most people sadly do and give it a bad rap.
- I love lisp type languages. Very neat. Your instructor sounds like a stupid fuck. I say this as a professional programmer.

Shout out to CAD users here!

I use python occasionally at work.
... Not IT approved, but well... we use an MSP, and I get to be a decision maker in the company for certain things, and just do it, because well.... I can, and the company keeps me around partially for the things I do with python and sql.
I would like to say Pandas should be used for much of that excel stuff, maybe even replace it, but... Microsoft has decided to bring Python capabilities into excel, so that will likely cement them in your workflow even further:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439
- I've found the selling point in not needing to open excel and click around to run the script. So often people need to do like the same three things and don't even know how to write Python, so giving them a script to drag your file onto is a step up from excel

I'm in university and I use both...

Man I guess I’m spoiled. We get access to the top row except SolidWorks because we license an alternative. We use the entire MS suite too though but as a supplement. I don’t use excel hardly at all because JMP is superior in every single way, except for dashboards where we use PowerBI.

despite all my rage i'm still just a rat in a cave

I dynamic for crm, SQL

So True, what about Automic, and Imformatica? Also Oracle..

What is stopping you from proposing better software?
- Never worked in a corporate environment?
  
  Sure I have.
  If you spin it by saying it would improve productivity, they'll listen and pretend it was their idea all along.
- Nothing. It's the listening bit from the receiving end that's the problem.
- Management.
- Mainly corporate momentum.
  The decision to shift out of the microsoft is too costly at this point for even medium sized businesses to consider.

I'm sorry for your loss

That bottom row of wojaks are ableist as hell, I really wish people would stop using them.
- Just enable Accessibility settings under Options.
- 4chan is a perpetual blight on memetic culture
  
  Yeah, I really hate when their shit sticks..
- Wojacks are the laziest shit ever. So ugly. So annoying. And yes absolutely ableist and other worthless stereotypes

I for one think this demonstrates how overpriced universities are. All of academia is comparable to a ponzi scheme.

Your IT is retarded if they won't let you use SOLIDWORKS or python
- It's usually just one manager making a clear case for the business need through the proper channel from being installed in most businesses