As a person who grew up with Lotus in DOS then moved to Windows with it. I was pretty good. Now for the last year I’ve used and become excellent at Excel. I like it SO much better.
I have yet to come across one thing Lotus does better or easier.
Lotus irritates me much more effectively than Excel does.
I agree completely-- I use Excel (for Windows at work and the Mac at home-- it’s just about the only Microsoft product I’ll allow in my home ) But at work some of our govt. clients insist on Lotus 1-2-3. For database stuff they once asked us to use “Lotus Approach,” which none of us had ever heard of. We convinced them to let us use Access.
It wasn’t too long ago that my associates used {{shudder}} Quattro Pro. Lord have mercy.
When I last used Lotus, you could set the zoom as a view option, not a notebook property that has to be set for each page (a pain in the ass). Even worse, if you put something on the clipboard and, say, insert a column, the stuff on the clipboard disappears!!! (A royal pain in the ass.) It’s been a number of years since I used Lotus, and I wasn’t crazy about it, but Excel is the largest piece of crap I’ve ever used. It’s mostly not functionality, but little things like this that really affect usability (and obvoiusly a lot of it is what you’re used to, although for the life of me I don’t understand the clipboard thing).
And, correct me if I’m wrong, but you can’t do macros in Excel now unless you know Visual Basic. Nothing like that Lotus macro language for simple (and not-so-simple) repetitive tasks. I’m too young to be passed by, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to learn a new language to do the simplest things.
Quattro used to be outstanding, particularly its graphics. It seems to have regressed somewhat since its purchase by Corel, though I still prefer it to either of the other two.
Many of the charting functions of Lotus were more forgiving and free. I do miss having the ability to name data points whatever I like and easily embedding a chart in another document. Really, though, I miss Lotus about as much as that bad burrito I ate last week.