Why does everybody hate Excel?

[hellfire45]

In the last 5 years of working with Excel and VBA, I have numerous times run across people who flat out seem to dismiss the utility of using Excel, sometimes entirely.

I hear things like:

"Excel isn't robust, we have to put it in SAP, Alteryx, Access etc.."

"VBA doesn't add value to the end user."

"VBA and Excel isn't programming."

"Excel workbooks are too slow."



Everybody seems to reject Excel first as a potential solution to problems. I have 100 page long VBA programs that do hundreds out hours of manual work in 10 minutes and when I write an excel formula that has 25 nested functions in it, surely that too is programming.

Anybody else run into this kind of attitude and feel frustrated by it? As an analyst that primarily uses Excel and Tableau it is frustrating when an automation I create in Excel is easily dismissed, even after completion, in favor of virtually any alternative.

When I create an automation in 2 weeks that does a variety of things and then the IT department insists that it be put into SAP, and it takes them a month to even complete the scoping session I think to myself "hmm...Excel doesn't look so bad now for its versatility, flexibility and speed of implementation."

Thoughts?

 

[Krayons]

I don't like the way Microsoft want to put you into a box - you use excel fantastic - now we want you to run all your excel sheets in the same window and have you use window views. I have two monitors and would like to view sheets side by side - but if I do I can't copy paste as values from one to the other! Thanks Microsoft!

This is possible; at least in Excel 2016 it is.

1. On the View tab, in the Window group, click New Window.
2. On the View tab, in the Window group, click View Side by Side.
3. In each workbook window, click the sheet that you want to compare.

When doing this, I can view two sheets simultaneously, one in each monitor, and freely copy and paste data between the two.