It quietly became a thing you could open a spreadsheet from a network share, and so could someone else, and both live-edit it in realtime with markers for where each other is. Not just two people, either. Then gained that with SharePoint cloud backing which means the people don't need to be on the same LAN. And gained a web version which can be scripted in JavaScript instead of Visual Basic for Applications, and so desktop and web users can open, view, edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. With the Microsoft365 backing, someone can @ you in an Excel cell and M365 will email you about it to alert you. Spreadsheets are accessible from the MS Graph API and with a REST interface[1] which means they can be generated and updated from code while on M365, it means Excel can be used as a backend calculation engine in a supported way now (instead of running it headless on a server in an unsupported way), and spreadsheets integrate with PowerAutomate[2].
As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over Chromebooks and Android and macOS and Linux desktops.
I don't see much value in any of this, nor in any of the "improvements" occurring in the last 10 years.
Still Word is crashing regularly when it reaches 100+ pages, and bullets and alike are acting weird. And if the dreaded document corruption occurs, you are good to copy paste the whole in a new blank document.
That people want to pay 100€/yr min for this is beyond me.
Perhaps you don't but these are critical features in many businesses. The company I work for does government contracts where we have 3000 line cost models that are shared by 6+ organisations and maintained by 20+ people with daily updates. Without having them accessible by everyone at once, people would be creating daily copies which would need to get reconciled.
it still has locks thou - unless you use the less powerful online version. Would be better imho to have a lock free desktop version of Excel that operates like an IDE where you merge changes and resolve conflicts at the point of merge.
But also many of the core features are still broken. The fx formula bar button still opens the 1990s non resizable window with a search function that doesn't do anything, and you have to go through a list of thousands of forumula in a tiny box. They never fixed the bug that corrupts xlsm files (I recommend people to never use xlsm for that reason). They also managed to break things, like it has become almost impossible to copy a chart or table from excel to powerpoint without the whole formating being lost (the biggest pain being red negative numbers).
Yeah, there has been minor improvements. Ditching the 65k row limit, waterfall charts, xlookup (though 20 years too late, people had index/match all over their spreadsheets from day 1), 64bit version of excel. The more recent version automatically spills formula returning arrays over multiple cells, useful for users who can't do array formulas.
But many new features I wouldn't touch with a stick. The BI feature that downloads whole table from a database in memory even if you only need one day and there are billions of rows. I always found tables pretty much useless. In term of UI, they dramatically increased the number of clicks to get to a button (try inserting many shapes in powerpoint or excel, or changing many chart/shape formats, things are deeply nested). If you look at the default formats (tables, charts) have been designed by people who never looked at a corporate presentation.
And there are udf I created that I don't understand why aren't part of the default feature set. A formula to deduplicate a list, or split a text based on delimiters, or to execute a sql query against a database and return an array (I know there are buttons for that, but a button requires manual work every time you need to refresh the data, vs a shift-F9 when it is formula based). And why is it still so hard to refresh a ppt presentation based on numbers coming from spreadsheets. It is one of the most common and basic use.
It’s a powerful platform for sure. But having just been in a scenario where 8 people tried to work on a moderately complex sheet simultaneously, the collaboration aspects still suck - Google still owns that.
That is a fantastically perceptive and compact analysis. Do you have a blog or anything? Tried to stalk your username I think maybe you’re using it might be a play on a Doctor Who actor or something.
Thank you; I don't have a blog, just use HN and Reddit as sinks for opinions. My username is a wordplay on a radio telescope near Manchester, England, which I visited a few times as a kid when they had science exhibits on the grounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory
As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over Chromebooks and Android and macOS and Linux desktops.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-ap...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flow...