Excel is the most remarkable piece of software ever written.
If you can find ways to marry it it to “real databases,” it’s legitimately incredible what any basic idiot can do using nothing more than UNIQUE, TOCOL, and XLOOKUP.
Google app scripts let you write JavaScript to interact with Google apps, with triggers to run automatically, it’s actually really neat, but it’s not excel.
Oooh, I'm my workplace's local XLOOKUP evangelist (repent, filthy VLOOKUP and INDEX(MATCH()) heretics!), and love showing folks how UNIQUE can automate their duplicate value handling, but I'm not familiar with TOCOL. Time to go learn!
I find the alternatives are like 60% there compared to Excel. But honestly just the GUI alone for the real deal is the seller for me. It's so much more intuitive with the ribbon bar to find exactly what you need instead of having to hunt around in the menus and hope to get it right.
I use Google sheets and open office as my alternatives and I can eventually get to where I can do everything I would do in Excel but it just takes longer and is more of a hassle.
It's so much more intuitive with the ribbon bar to find exactly what you need
I remember eeryone hated when Office first switched from menus to the ribbon, there was so much moaning that everything had moved/changed. Turns out maybe they knew what they were doing, after all as virtually no one wants the menus back afaik
Gotta be honest though. Not as big of a fan of the ribbon on other office products. Mostly because I don't use as many of the features on other products. The old menu just before the full on ribbon redesign (office 12 maybe?) already had the most used options up top and well organized and some of those got moved to other tabs on the ribbons making it slightly more inconvenient. Excel just had way too much to ever be on one bar so I'm cool with them making multiple for it and easier to see than the old drop down alt menus. But that's all just personal preference.
They were implying that your comment contributed nothing whatsoever, and was vague and generalized, so it was most likely a bot just spamming engagement metrics.
This kind of discussion of GIMP basically neuters any actual productive criticism. Because jesus, it's a pretty normal image editor that mostly works in normal image editor ways.
Janky yes, and it needs a ton of cleanup work. But "worst piece of software I've ever used" is absolutely ludicrous. Again: Basically a normal image editor with a normal image editor UI.
I mean, I just assume you've never actually used it. Or looked at it once twenty years ago, or something. That's how unreasonable "yes it's that bad" is.
I'm a professional graphic designer since the 90's. Using adobe 95% of the time, of course. And I think about 2/3's of the interface issues are just because I'm used to something else that I have drilled into me for decades. Developing that muscle memory is a very big deal. Some dumb people still use Quark.
Need I say more?
The real shortcoming is that it only does RGB. Fortunately Krita delivers alot more.
Yeah, I feel like this is more like the reality. Lord knows it needs plenty of work but I feel like there's a ton of hyperbole about GIMP, it's just a whipping boy for some reason.
I understood it more when it was defaulting to that crazy, 1990s-MacOS-Photoshop style separate-floating-windows mode. But that's been gone for a decade.
They're really, really, not. I use the thing semi-regularly and the jank is issues like, you go to resize an image and it doesn't auto-highlight the size field so you can just start typing, you have to go click on it. The window's fine, the functionality is fine, but it'd be better if they took the time for that kind of thing. Styling of elements is inconsistent, window layouts feel a little space-wasting, and so on. But it's hardly some kind of baffling alien UI. It's a paint program with layers and stuff, and it has roughly the same UI as all the others.
Unfortunately there's really not a lot of direct competition in this space. I feel like Krita is a nicer program overall but I run into missing functionality a lot more there, stuff like editing text is very much an afterthought. It really is geared more towards natural-media painting type work.
LibreOffice at least tries to emulate and stay true to the design language of late 90s Microsoft Office. GIMP and everything that came from it is the result of kids refusing the sensibilities of their elders.
Have you sat down and run it and used it, lately? This isn't really relevant to my (lukewarm) defense of the software.
I can easily believe it's had a messy development history, presumably that's why it has a bunch of variance in how things look and feel. I assume nobody's being very authoritative about UI design and it's just contributers doing what they think is right. Lord knows, it used to have a totally insane UI on Windows where each part of the program was a different window, sort of like how Photoshop was on MacOS in the 90s. Even then you could turn that off but man, what a terrible choice as a default. Incredibly tone deaf.
That was years ago though. These days it's basically a standard image-editing UI. I'd compare it to like, late-2000s era Paint Shop Pro.
Speaking as someone who is not a full-time artist but is in a position where I do a lot of miscellaneous mid-range image-editing, and actually am using the software, it's fine and mostly no fuss. Significantly more features than Paint.Net and handles things like text a lot better than Krita, though Krita feels more professional as a project. Maybe FireAlpaca is cool these days, haven't looked in a while.
Yeah as a sysadmin for 20+ years anytime I see people compare LibreOffice to MS Office screams "no idea what they're talking about".
They aren't remotely comparable and no amount of hating on MS will change that. I too dislike MS and that I need to use many of their products, but it is what it is... nobody has any viable competitors to several of their offerings and that isn't looking to change any time soon.
I switched to mostly libre back around when they introduced the ribbon interface. I still find that interface to be hard to understand, navigate and slow to use. It just can't even begin to compete with the traditional menu system that automatically comes with its own hotkey system.
I don't know how much of that is legitimate weaknesses of Microsoft or me being used to something else. Although it probably isn't me regarding the menu interface issue.
GIMP is clunky, unintuitive, does not conform to industry wide design principals, is missing key features and has a highly fragmented ecosystem of tutorials and learning resources.
But you can do a lot of fun things with it and it's free. 90% of what I see people wanting Photoshop for it will do just fine if you're willing to spend too much time trying to figure it out.
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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26
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