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From: Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-11,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: The problem with not owning the software
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2024 08:25:01 -0000 (UTC)
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-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.