I have absolutely no idea why pivot tables would die before spreadsheet software. If people are using spreadsheet software, of course pivot tables will be useful. So to put my stack overflow hat on, it's asking the wrong question. Its entirely a matter of whether or not spreadsheet software has a place.

It's the best tool I never want to work with.

You can also read here, in case that works better: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/why-pivot-tables-never-die/. And it's definitely not LLM written. And I tried to answer the why in the chapter "Why Pivot Tables Endure":

> The enduring power of pivot tables is their robustness, simple usage, and fast, interactive response. It's the Lingua Franca of data if you are not fluent in the language of SQL or Python. A common language everyone understands: the top management, domain experts, and developers. It's an interface to data; it's the first no-code interface. Instead of the multidimensional query language MDX or the newer DAX, people can use a simple drag-and-drop interface. It democratized data analysis.

>Also, somehow this page completely messed up my browser history - I could not just click the back arrow to navigate back.

It seems like the page updates the page url every time you scroll to a new section, which means you end up with 10+ history entries for the page if you scroll all the way through. To exit out of the page you'd have to click back 10+ times to go through those history entries. Google maps does something similar, where it adds a new entry to history every time you pan, which means your history is polluted with entries for google maps.

That web site is impressively terrible.

Discussed here:

The pivot table, the spreadsheet's most powerful tool (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820877 - Oct 2023 (192 comments)

Are you talking about linear programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming

Demo of Lotus Improv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbsfvdZXE7s&t=205s

Linear optimisation? Ie. The excel "solver"

* maths exam...

Yup. Messing with my back button is an immediate fuck off.

They are in most spreadsheets and many databases now. Even Sheets and Numbers and Oracle SQL etc... maybe just without the same UI.

Microsoft copied the basic concept from Lotus, and Borland also copied it etc...

It is the best, but also the very very worst in so many ways.

There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.

I wish more people stop hating on Excel. It's an incredible tool with cool stuff baked in (Python support, PowerQuery, etc.). Just because some people misuse it as database or it doesn't scale well beyond a couple of 10k rows does not make it a bad product. For 90% of daily office tasks it's just fine.

I love Excel. In some ways it is similar to Jupyter Notebooks: great for exploration, horrible for using in production.

Tangential: Timeless post I go back and read through periodically: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

I'm a BI engineer, and I always convince people to use something else. But when I need to calculate my finances, and does not fit into Obsidian, I find myself using Excel again too :D Great product. Maybe not so much if you need to align on financial numbers - as everyone has their own truth :)

MS Excel is good because it has Lisp inside. Does Pivot thing contain Lisp?

The advantage of Pivot Tables is they are interactive, but (modern) dynamic array formulas are better in cases where you are producing a static result.