Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.

The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.

On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.

For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).

Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.

And now you need to install and learn 10 different programs instead of one. Excel is used a lot because you can do so much with it which is also one of its downsides when people build things with it they really shouldn’t.

RTF works with anything. On XLS and the rest. it should be a common ground like RTF for word processing. And I don't mean CSV/TSV, but a truly open core standard. No, nothing like HTML5 where it grew up organically like a disease, with bloat on top.

Also, input and output shouldn't be allowed to be mixed by design. Data in one sheet, and formulae output in another. And no automatic parsing should be done, ever. Remember Excel with Genomics, or the issues mangling dates. Or worse, locales, which are another issue under Unix.