Microsoft Excel

What hackers pick instead

• Google SheetsPeople recommend it as a free, easy spreadsheet that handles most calculations, planning and simple data work well. The common caveat is that it slows down and feels awkward once data or formulas get large or complicated.92recommend
• Lotus 1-2-3Recommended for keyboard-driven speed, fast performance on 486-era PCs, and an uncluttered interface suited to financial modeling; critics cite manual, keystroke-based workflows.34recommend
• LibreOffice CalcFree spreadsheet many people find good enough for most work and Excel files; critics say it is slower and lacks newer Excel features.32recommend
• Numbers by AppleFree Apple spreadsheet people find good enough, praised for movable tables and smooth scrolling. Critics cite weak keyboard support and nagging upgrade prompts.27recommend
• cell terminal spreadsheet editorQuick, low-latency spreadsheet in the terminal with Vim keybindings, so you can skip Google Sheets or Emacs org-table. Critics report doubled characters on input.12recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 751 comments. Each links to the original.

1. A single spreadsheet used locally is probably the best imaginable tool for answering "what if I changed that." That same sheet shared across an organization suddenly becomes a game of "what caused that change."

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Seeing Like a Spreadsheet”

2. XLOOKUP is so nice though. The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices”

3. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

4. With its integrations and Turing completeness, unlike word processing or presentation- if it requires excel you just need to use excel.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices”

5. more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?”

6. When it comes to empowering, I am not sure much beats Excel. It lets non techy people codify amazing things and get real work done.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)”

7. Excel has been around democratizing programming for the businesses of any kind and people of any kind and created a lot of value

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Gemini 3”

8. By the time it takes to make a custom filtered table non extensible UI for an api, the excel guy is finished three times over

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell”

9. the replacement of the calculation engine with an array first engine with spill, and array functions was even more powerful

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell”

10. It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title”

11. Obviously with excel, if you make a mistake you just correct it and excel automatically recalculates everything instantly.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise”

12. array programming features, logging, and (time-travel!) debugging all intuitively graspable for most non-technical people

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “EYG: A Programming Language for Humans”

13. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT department to do.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers”

14. If you're only ever going to learn exactly one spreadsheet app in your life, Excel is the one you probably want to learn

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “US Schools Are Ditching Chromebooks for MacBooks by the Thousands”

15. I think programmets often underestimate the power of Excel for non-programmers, it in practice runs the business world.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers”

16. excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20%”

17. This looks like a very sane implementation, addresses some issues with traditional arrays (while extending them nicely)

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell”

18. where most non-programmers frequently come the closest to programming and actually create useful apps for themselves

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?”

19. Everyone knows how to use it effectively and the cost of training every accountant or finance person is far greater

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Why we can’t quit Excel”

20. Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers”

21. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Why we can’t quit Excel”

22. the one common thread just about everywhere I worked (or contracted at) has used Excel to run some amazing sh*t

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers”

23. Excel works, the VBA macros with random business rules work, people with business knowledge know how to use it

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised”

24. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office”

25. a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel. Kinda like a combination of Excel, TUI, and MS Access in one. Fast like Numbers.app, not sluggish like Excel is.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal”

26. People worry when very important things are done with Excel because it has practically no mechanisms guiding the user toward avoiding mistakes.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What even is an OS now?”

27. Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

28. an inadvertent click+drag can move data between cells, and since the cells are uniform it's hard to see that anything unintended happened

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors”

29. It's completely Excel's fault for pushing their type-inference and making it difficult for users to define or supply their own.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors”

30. Excel excels because if fills the 2D user interface. But not separating calculations from the tabular position in the UI is a historical failure

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell”

31. The core was solid and performant. Just slightly inscrutable at time and not the kind of code you're use to reading outside of Excel.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “ChatGPT for Excel”

32. The problem is that Excel is the only flexible tool many people have so they bend it to do everything in lieu of anything better.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “My Rules for Using Spreadsheets”

33. a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title”

34. counterintuitive in the same manner as when excel persists undo history chronologically across the running application process

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted”

35. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas”

36. Excel is a cross department business automation database, which can sync/pull/push datasets across filesystems and networks.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft”

37. It's likely More robust and safer than the vibe coded app that could trigger data loss / incorrectness / issues any time.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “AI Is Killing B2B SaaS”

38. The first thing I do in Excel is select the pseudo table and click on table -> insert to make it a sortable / real table.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Codex for Almost Everything”

39. You can design a bitmap font in Excel, and use formulas to output the C array that you then paste into your Arduino IDE

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Seeing Like a Spreadsheet”

40. I think Excel is amazingly well engineered, and very well designed for the majority of the users, despite some flaws.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere”