I have never seen a programmer as excited to tell me about something like, say, Duff's Device as I've seen one excel user hear another ask "what're pivot tables"? and to have the other reply "Let me show you..." That may have to do with the kind of party I end up at, but "helping each other out" is a rather important feature of any community. There are also Excel championships with a prize. https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/microsoft-excel-wor...
When's the last time you got a prize for programming outside of your paycheck or a signing bonus? Communities definitely have shared events and what better shared event than a competition?
I'm amused that's still going, one of my classmates qualified for and attended the Word championship hosted in Vegas many years ago.
As for programming prizes, "last week" if we're counting bug-bounties, "a few years ago" if we're counting CTFs, and 5 years ago if we're not.
Clearly there is an Excel community in the general sense but as far as I know it isn't centered around any particular venue - at least, not one at the scale of GitHub or Scratch
All Microsoft needs to do here is to include a stripped down IM inside Excel, a blend between MS Teams and Chatroulette, but with a twist: it will upload what you're working on to Bing to take a look at, group you with others whose Excel sheets are closest to your in the latent space, and connect you all in a group chat.
I wonder if you could have this where the chat just tokenizes or minifies code on the client and spits out human readable made up stuff on the other end.
