I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
I used sheets because it was portable and flexible, but now I’d almost always just use a db instead.
My main use for excel now is “I need to send data to someone who isn’t a programmer” and doing json > CSV conversions to see if my 3000 rows of data from a 3rd party have all the necessary bits.
I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
I’ve gone full circle
Loved sheets, then hated them because we should just use a DB
Now I do stuff in sheets with a tab explaining how I got the data because I can email it to someone and in 4 months it still answers their questions.
I used sheets because it was portable and flexible, but now I’d almost always just use a db instead.
My main use for excel now is “I need to send data to someone who isn’t a programmer” and doing json > CSV conversions to see if my 3000 rows of data from a 3rd party have all the necessary bits.
I guess it depends, I can make a pivot table in like 30 seconds, which is faster than setting up and loading data into a notebook.