Re: The problem with not owning the software

On 12/29/24 4:00 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 29 Dec 2024 16:39:41 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:
 

   And of course I still get the occasional .doc[x] attachment from
someone who only *needs* a note-taking program, but only *has* (or knows
how to use) Word. Luckily my current Windows 11 seems to grok such
files, at least I didn't have to install LibreOffice since I got it,
over two years ago. Knock on wood.

 That's my annoyance with Excel. Any xls document I've ever gotten was a
freeform notepad with handy rows. I can't recall ever getting a xls where
there were any manipulations on the cells. When all you know how to use is
a hammer...

That's a very common 'organizer' use case.
I have some analytically based Excel stuff; it can get involved to build in certain types of logic (like "last entry" instead of "MAX").  Ditto for cell formatting which doesn't break from "divide by [no data]". I don't know how many cells it is, but a couple are over 1MB in size, including one with 21 tabs plus links to pull in data from other spreadsheets.
I have a colleague who's done some amazing stuff in Excel using Visual Basic Script (VBS); the PC I had at the time would fail just trying to load the files; his beefy machine he had would take literally hours to crunch through a set.  A quick search shows that I still have an older copy: it takes up 14.34GB on disk. Youch.
-hh