Re: The problem with not owning the software

-hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com> wrote:

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.

Sounds horribly inefficient and virtually impossible to debug. I'd bet a
decent python script would do it in minutes, with a tiny footprint and be
reliable.