alt Hacker NewsThe other aspects is the new generation doesn't understand it. During interviews in marketing but also for a medical field expert, I often ask "make a small budget so you'll see how your bonus will work", and even the PhD, which is the top academic level, couldn't use a basic formula. How do they deal with data during a PhD? "In Prism", she said.
Same for marketing students and, although it's a lower academic level, they still need Excel for prospect lists.
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A PhD is not for teaching about specific software tools, and hopefully even less so about legacy software from the 80's.
If you want people to be able to use Excel or service a mechanical typewriter, you need to spend extra effort to teach them.
I'm one of those. Excel's ease of use isn't relevant if you already know how to use Python / Jupyter / DuckDB / whatever.
The mental model of describing a series of reproducible transformations on normalized tables is more intuitive to me.
Excel lets you do too many things. As a result, I mostly see spreadsheets that aren't much more machine-parsanle than a word document.
We had to write a score-table at a party lately, and a while ago, and I managed to get it working with DataSpell faster, than it took us to figure out how Google Sheets stupid date-parsing works.
Recent grads at all levels always suffer from this problem. The issue is they’ve not needed to use it with enough frequency in their academic lives to build the knowledge or muscle memory. Things have improved a lot in past 10 years or so, but it’s even true with many Finance and Accounting grads (that’s who I hire). Many of them just have never seen real world business data and working with it so different than the contrived information they had seen in coursework. That said give them $15 to spend on Udemy. Then, give them a few assignments, with real world business data. And most people pick it up pretty quickly.