Excel has to contend with nearly 40 years of backwards compatibility (MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, was released in 1982) and a deep userbase that literally has decades of experience and muscle memory with the software. The Symbolic Link "SYLK" file format introduced in MultiPlan is still supported in recent versions of Excel, leading to the infamous CSV "ID" issue.
Many of our users still run very old versions of Excel and Windows (e.g. Excel 5.0 on Windows 95) because a change in a future version of Excel caused problems or gave different results.
Excel has to contend with nearly 40 years of backwards compatibility (MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, was released in 1982) and a deep userbase that literally has decades of experience and muscle memory with the software. The Symbolic Link "SYLK" file format introduced in MultiPlan is still supported in recent versions of Excel, leading to the infamous CSV "ID" issue.
Many of our users still run very old versions of Excel and Windows (e.g. Excel 5.0 on Windows 95) because a change in a future version of Excel caused problems or gave different results.