this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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The other day I couldn't get my VLOOKUP function to work because the table I was trying to query hadn't been designated "Table2" but "Table14" because....? Company laptop was dangerously close to putting a small dent in the closest brick wall. Doing this for fun? What?
I think at certain point you're kind of expected to switch to INDEX & MATCH. I did plenty of Excel macros for work back in the day and at similar point I just switched to doing things in Python.
Xlookup
I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn't easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time...
If you're reliant on third party add-ons you don't have a choice. Bloomberg and Eikon are two examples that didn't have a good Python API back then. Even after I started to use Python more sometimes I had to script opening up Excel itself, forcing formula refresh and exporting that.
You also need to consider that average Joe at a big financial corporation knows Excel so he uses that for everything. People that know Python are more expensive.
Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something "from scratch", i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.
(1) I'm aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.
At that point you should just use a database.
There are environments where Excel is used as glue that does faux-ETL for very unpredictable data which is so small in volume you don't even consider a database. Also, database would mean MS Access which is just icky so it was used only when necessary.