Comment by yummypaint
4 days ago
I would go further and say that MS products have completely backwards priorities that lead to an overinflated feature count. What good is fancy formatting in excel if it chokes and crashes once the file hits about 20 MB? Yet despite all this emphasis on form over function over multiple decades of being a flagship product for a multibillion dollar software empire, it still produces plots that are unacceptable for publication and instill bad habits in students.
I'm convinced the people who insist on "features" in these products don't actually use them, because if they did they would realize they suck and are a distraction from a poor core product. It's like people in the US who live in downtown apartments and insist on driving massive overpriced pickup trucks to commute to work and get groceries, never hauling or towing or leaving the pavement. They would be better served by commuter vehicles, but all they've ever driven is show trucks and learning new things is scary. If they did attempt to do real work, they would quickly realize the bed can't hold a standard sheet of plywood.
The important thing is that they FEEL like they have capability at their fingertips, even if this is obviously an illusion to people who actually use those capabilities.
It's possible you found a bug in Excel somewhere but I guarantee that when working with large files it's generally faster and more reliable than the competition. I have successfully worked with files way larger than 20 MB which make competing products such as Apple Numbers or Google Sheets completely choke.
Compare with gnumeric, that's the only spreadsheet I can recommend. I have files with hundreds of plots, non-trivial fits, and logic. 100% of everything works always and it's much faster.
I have a direct comparison because the exact same computations were previously implemented in excel and libre office. Both dropped plots from files, had straight-up reference bugs once things got large, and would regularly crash attempting to render dozens of tiled plots in 4k. The idea of using Google sheets for this is laughable.