alt Hacker NewsExcel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
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From 2020: "Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)
Excel has had huge changes that made it much more powerful a lot more recently than that.
> Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?
def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.