What does Excel do that something like LibreOffice Calc does not? I'm genuinely curious because I've not run into any issues with the latter that the former would've solved so far.
I realise my comment sounded like I was saying the features of Excel are not comparable. What I really meant was simply that, like MS Word (which I hate with a passion), it's so ubiquitous that guaranteeing compatibility between businesses is often worth a significant amount of dollars in time saved.
Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc.
If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime.
If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention.
Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above.
Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2]
People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance.
Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business.
Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script.
Thank you for the explanations! Other than multiplayer spreadsheet editing this doesn't sound too relevant to students though or what they will be taught.
That’s true in the same way that it’s true of Visual Studio, but how many people really need all that functionality in their job?
I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.
(Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).