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posted by martyb on Monday November 26 2018, @02:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the putting-it-all-together dept.

If you've ever tried to use the CONCATENATE function in Microsoft Excel to merge the values in a range of cells, you know it doesn't work unless you add each cell to the function, one by one.

You might have noticed the following message in the support article for CONCATENATE:

Important: In Excel 2016, Excel Mobile, and Excel Online, this function has been replaced with the CONCAT function. Although the CONCATENATE function is still available for backward compatibility, you should consider using CONCAT from now on. This is because CONCATENATE may not be available in future versions of Excel.

Meet the alternatives: CONCAT and TEXTJOIN

for CONCAT and TEXTJOIN:

Note: This feature is not available in Excel 2016 unless you have an Office 365 subscription. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, make sure you have the latest version of Office.

While it is admirable that Microsoft is finally fixing some of the idiosyncrasies of its software, I fear the future will bring a level of fragmentation unseen since the office 2003 to 2007 switch.


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  • (Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday November 28 2018, @01:44AM

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 28 2018, @01:44AM (#767140) Journal

    LibreOffice Calc is a poor substitute for Excel for anything beyond relatively simple spreadsheets

    You're half right, but mainly wrong.

    The business users I work with will happily make intricate webs of office files, add in some macro-recorded VB jibberish to them and have it "just the way they want". You can't stick a LibreOffice file in the middle of that and expect it to work so you're right there.

    You pretty much however, can in fact replicate the same end output using LibreOffice - but it is done differently, and that's the sticking point. Users aren't prepared to learn to do some of those tasks again in a different way. It's People Change Management, not software functionality so much.

    The company I work for changed to Google Suit (though we still use MS Office, especially Excel, as needed). In the first year, Everyone hated Google Sheets. In the second year, more and more people were happily trading some of the scripting functionality for the collaboration offered by Sheets. Now, most of the files are Google Sheets based. Yes, there are some hold-outs (In finance and in planning) but even there, folks are shifting over.

    An enterprise environment doesn't NEED Office. It just needs a tool to enable the business users to communicate with one another. As more learn to do that via other solutions (while also becoming more generally tech savvy) the less reliance there is on a single product.

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