alt Hacker NewsI think you vaaastly overestimate how excel is used by most users
if anything, excel exceeds in being MOUSE-driven - it's intuitive in what you press and what you drag
and that's kinda my problem with the TFA - author is not representative of typical user. Mouse interaction is the king
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Screwing with a keyboard combo in Excel... like Shift-Space to highlight a row... is like an IDE deciding to swap the key-bindings for '{' and '['. You'd have entire accounting and marketing departments in rebellion.
Devs consistently underestimate how many power users of Excel there are, and often don't understand how they operate.
Maybe by most users, but not by most users who use it for many hours daily for professional tasks (i.e. not just as a kind of tabular list editor).
Basically everyone in a white collar job who is NOT a developer is using Excel. I'm a developer, even I have to use Excel at work.
"Most users" are not who choose business software.
I got my wife a new MacBook Air, and figured there's no point in paying for MS Office, iWork is fine for the household stuff she needs it for.
She loved Pages, being able to put images anywhere without stuff moving around behind her back.
She hated Numbers, since there were no cut/copy/paste/undo buttons on the toolbar. This is someone who has been using Excel at work for decades at this point. Definitely had a sudden insight as to how differently many users work.