Much as I dislike the Microsoft monoculture (hey! I’m a Mac user by preference!) there is one application Microsoft make that I truly love.

Excel: the swiss-army knife for data-wranglers.

Of course, this must be because it was originally developed for the Mac and only later ported to Windows, right? Not quite. It has other, more significant attractions. I love it in all its number crunching glory; its chartly goodness; its informatising of data; its massage into utility of unruly datasets. I like how I still manage to find useful features I never knew were there on quite a regular basis.

I spend a bit of time at work playing with data in Excel (but not figures: I’m no beancounter!) where my biggest gripe is that it can’t handle more than about 64,000 rows. And now, having Office X at home (look! pretty!) I can make nice anti-aliased graphs for my own amusement (for example, an update of my spam graph).

…

Oh. Stop. Just stop right there.

Having just stopped to read the crap I’m writing, I’ve changed the title of this post to “sad”.