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I still regard Office '97 as the best UI it ever had. I spent a lot of time inside it, including a couple of years at a bank reconciling corporate actions before I got my first programming job. The ribbon version was awful in comparison.

2003 was the best/final iteration of it - I still miss old excel

new excel is just garbage instead in virtually every way

Yeah, after that they started nuking VBA too. Sad times!
But…LAMBDA()! And LET() and friends.

Also, the Excel Labs formula editor. But it needs a way to tell it "I know I have too many cells! Just let me trace over the 100 nearest rows."

The old scripting language can still be handy if you can keep people from opening the online version of Excel. Especially if you have a certain debugger addin[1]. Excel's JavaScript features are of limited use, if you're offline.

I keep wishing for a spreadsheet to implement all its scripting and formulas in something like Forth behind the scenes, so that every time a competitor announces n-more functions, we can just be like "Oh, really?" and add it.

[1] Related to waterfowl of the plasticised yellow variety. I'm not sure I can mention the name in a post anymore, since ages ago when I tried multiple times to post a properly-referenced (overly-hyperlinked?) message while my connection was very flaky. Note to self: should probably mail dang about this, some day.

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