跟《经济学人》学英文：2024年10月19日这期 Why Microsoft Excel won’t die
Why Microsoft Excel won’t die
The business world’s favourite software program enters its 40th year
原文：
FOR MANY, Microsoft Excel is the epitome of corporate
drudgery. Its dreaded #VALUE! error has driven an incalculable
number of users to despair. Yet among financial analysts,
management consultants and even the odd business journalist, the
spreadsheet program, which this month entered its 40th year, is a
handy tool for everything from interrogating company financials to
pricing assets. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, has called it
the “best consumer product” the tech giant ever made. The program
even has its own world championship in Las Vegas, where
spreadsheet wizards pivot, concatenate and VLOOKUP their way
to victory.
对许多人来说，微软Excel是公司苦差事的缩影。它可怕的#VALUE！错误已经让不计其数的用户陷入绝望。然而，对于金融分析师、管理顾问，甚至是偶尔出现的商业记者来说，这个本月进入第40个年头的电子表格程序是一个方便的工具，可以用来处理从询问公司财务状况到资产定价的各种事情。微软老板塞特亚·纳德拉称其为科技巨头有史以来“最好的消费品”。该程序甚至在拉斯维加斯举办了自己的世界锦标赛，在那里，电子表格奇才们通过旋转、连接和VLOOKUP走向胜利。
学习：
epitome：美 [ɪˈpɪtəmi] 缩影；典型；典范；象征；
drudgery：美 [ˈdrʌdʒəri] 苦工；单调乏味的工作；辛苦无趣的劳动
dreaded：可怕的；令人恐惧的；
odd：偶尔的；偶然的
原文：
Excel was not the first spreadsheet for PCs. That honour belongs to
VisiCalc (short for visible calculator), built in 1979 by Dan
Bricklin, then a student at Harvard Business School. By 1983 a
rival program, Lotus 1-2-3, had taken the lead. When Microsoft
released Excel in 1985, it brought a few clever twists. Instead of
recalculating every cell when one changed, it updated only the
affected cells. This made it much faster, especially on early PCs.
Microsoft also ditched the clunky command-line interface for an
easier-to-use graphical one.
Excel不是第一个用于个人电脑的电子表格。这项荣誉属于VisiCalc(可视计算器的缩写)，由当时哈佛商学院的学生丹·布里克林于1979年创建。到1983年，一个与之竞争的程序Lotus 1-2-3已经领先。当微软在1985年发布Excel时，它带来了一些巧妙的变化。当一个单元格发生变化时，它不是重新计算每个单元格，而是只更新受影响的单元格。这使得它更快，尤其是在早期的个人电脑上。微软还放弃了笨重的命令行界面，转而采用更易于使用的图形界面。
学习：
ditch：丢弃
clunky：笨重的；沉闷的；粗笨的
原文：
Excel quickly became one of the most popular business tools.
Exact figures are hard to pin down because the software is bundled
with other Microsoft products, but last year the company reported
that its cloud version had nearly 400m paid users. Mastery of Excel
is prized: more than 100m LinkedIn users list it as a skill,
compared with 61m for Google Sheets, a rival program, according
to Senacea, a spreadsheet consultancy.
Excel很快成为最流行的商业工具之一。确切的数字很难确定，因为该软件与微软的其他产品捆绑在一起，但去年该公司报告称，其云版本拥有近4亿付费用户。电子表格咨询公司Senacea的数据显示，精通Excel受到重视:超过1亿LinkedIn用户将其列为一项技能，而其竞争对手Google Sheets的用户为6100万。
学习：
pin down：确定；证实；查明细节
原文：
Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders—though its
defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world
is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also
been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics
papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19
cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in
which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th
rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden
cells).
Excel在许多工作场所的失误中都很突出——尽管它的捍卫者会很快指责人为错误。金融界充斥着代价高昂的电子表格错误的故事。Excel也被指责在超过三分之一的基因组学论文中篡改基因名称(因为它把它们标为日期)；漏报英国的新冠肺炎病例(因为记录结果的行数有限)。
学习：
blunders：愚蠢的错误；大错；（blunder的复数）
littered：（～with）布满的；到处都是的；
botching：把…搞糟；（botch的现在分词形式）
原文：
Such snafus have not dented Excel’s dominance. Might artificial
intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered
by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the
familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated.
Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them
even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for
Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts.
Excel, and its faithful, aren’t ready to be filtered out just yet. ■
这样的混乱并没有削弱Excel的统治地位。人工智能(AI)可能会偷走它的皇冠吗？随着由承诺使数据分析更容易的技术驱动的令人惊叹的新工具的出现，熟悉的数字和计算网格可能很快就会感到过时。然而，人工智能可能会让它们变得更好，而不是取代电子表格。上个月，微软推出了Excel的人工智能助手，让用户使用自然语言提示处理数据。Excel及其忠实用户还没有准备好被过滤掉。■
学习：
snafu：美 [snæˈfu] 混乱局面；混乱状态；混乱
dent：削弱；损害
whizzy：新奇的；高效的；时髦的；
crunch：（快速大量地）处理信息
后记
2024年10月20日16点36分于上海。