[HN Gopher] Excel 2.0 - Is there a better visual data model than...
___________________________________________________________________
Excel 2.0 - Is there a better visual data model than a grid of
cells?
Author : antidnan
Score : 142 points
Date : 2022-03-31 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (subset.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (subset.so)
| DennisP wrote:
| Ted Nelson's ZigZag might have potential, now that the patent is
| expired. A previous HN discussion seems like a good starting
| point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210008
| DonHopkins wrote:
| How about a spreadsheet that's also an outliner?
|
| Here's an article and HN discussion about "Representing and
| Editing JSON with Spreadsheets" that I posted a few years ago
| about shoe-horning JSON into spreadsheets so it was easier to
| edit and process. But ideally I'd prefer a collaborative
| spreadsheet that's also an outliner (which I described in another
| post as "Google Trees").
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/representing-and-editing-json-...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109798
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Like the Google Docs of TreeSheets?
| snide wrote:
| I've shifted to Airbase for pretty much anything data sheet
| related. The ability to have more typical data-flow joins with an
| easier to manage UX that teaches folks along the way is pretty
| phenomenal. It grows as you need, but still remains relatively
| simple.
|
| It's one of my favorite pieces of software from the past decade.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Are you talking about this? https://www.airbase.com/ The
| website does a great job at making me avoid it
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Do you mean Airtable?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Airtable is great, but it's got more of Access than Excel in
| its genes imho.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I agree, but say more about what you mean here.
| Closi wrote:
| > The ability to have more typical data-flow joins
|
| This is available in Excel too - you can import data with
| PowerQuery, perform joins, configure relationships between
| multiple tables, then output that into a chart, table or pivot
| table. You can even put slicers on to let users interact with
| the data.
|
| This is entirely automatable too, so if the underlying data
| changes you can just run the pipeline again.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Reinventing excel is sort of like reinventing the spoke wheel.
| It's so fundamentally simple yet so useful.
| slightwinder wrote:
| There is always something better. But the dirty little secret of
| spreadsheets is that they are so universal, that some way or
| another, you can force mostly everything somehow into the grid.
| The grid is the plaintext for data. It's not always the best, but
| usually good enough.
| riidom wrote:
| Most innovative in that space I know of, would be TreeSheets.
|
| https://strlen.com/treesheets/
|
| And this software is at least 9 years old :)
| imhoguy wrote:
| It is just one of many mind mapping tools and it misses "calc"
| part. Looks like more lightweight Freemind/Freeplane.
| riidom wrote:
| It is a lot of things, mind mapping one of them - just as you
| can probably use excel for mind mapping as well (never tried
| that:) )
|
| The calc part is not missing, see here: https://strlen.com/tr
| eesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screen... - it's more basic
| than what excel has.
| InflexHQ wrote:
| It does have limited calc, but I tend to think of it as
| more of an afterthought. The scripting is "very incomplete"
| in the words of the author, consider e.g.
| https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/issues/37
| imhoguy wrote:
| Alright, I wasn't aware about the calc feature from the
| front-page read impression ;)
| sbayeta wrote:
| Looks great. I've thought of a similar concept very fuzzily in
| my head.
| KMag wrote:
| I find https://ellx.io/ very interesting, after chatting with
| its creator on HN a while ago in another next-gen spreadsheets
| discussion.
|
| At first glance, it's just a web-native spreadsheet where
| formulas and macros are both JavaScript instead of Excel
| formulas and VBA. However, it's clever in doing some
| introspection and automatic functional-reactive lifting in
| cases where inputs to the formulas are external time-varying
| inputs. You write something that looks like regular JavaScript,
| but if one or more of your inputs is actually a time-varying
| function, then the result is a time-varying function that looks
| like a regular JavaScript variable but is automatically updated
| whenever its dependencies change. So you get something like the
| automatic updating semantics of Excel expressions, which is
| very different from the semantics of regular JavaScript
| variables.
|
| I seem to also remember some clever introspection abilities on
| those time-varying functions, but it's been a while. In any
| case, it's obvious the creator has thought long and hard about
| how web-native spreadsheets should behave.
|
| It's also interesting in that you can either explicitly name
| the cell's result using var_name = expression or else just have
| a bare expression, in which case an implicit variable name is
| created, similar to Excel's $A$4 naming of cell results.
| rwhaling wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a ton lately - I think the holy
| grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the
| capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent
| in power to a Jupyter notebook.
|
| This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form
| data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As
| well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-
| level formulas into a logical "row", and describe row-level
| operations, with some kind of rough type checking or duck typing?
|
| But you might want to still retain an ability to lay out the
| result of computations free-form for invoice and other reporting
| uses that Excel is still great for?
|
| Better graphical visualization would be nice too and I think
| that's actually in reach - there are great open source options
| like vegalite and apache echarts that open up a lot of
| possibilities for new tools.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| You know, despite being quite different than what you
| described, what comes close for me in concept is the Spyder
| IDE. They have pretty reasonable data visualization tools when
| you go to inspect variables. I find it really nice work in. It
| lets me do the real visualization and interplay between
| variables in code or in my head and just quickly inspect
| tables/vectors/rasters to sanity check as I work in real time.
|
| What's missing is the ability to then manipulate those tables
| and have it backfeed into the code, but I think that honestly
| you could again get close to that with some basic right-
| click>generate new column> type in python expression >
| translate to input into interpreter type of workflow.
|
| I also know there are some python based excel type programs.
| antupis wrote:
| I think holy grail is ai-assisted system where you can ask by
| plain English queries. Something like Wolfram alpha + gtp-3 +
| erp.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Maybe it's possible to find ways to better represent relational
| data?
|
| Two interesting approaches:
|
| - Ultrorg [1] attempts to represent relational databases in an
| excel-like format. You can build a query by editing the header of
| the table, and then edit the results in place.
|
| - Tableau [2][3] is a visualisation construction tool, where
| users can describe a graph by assigning properties to rows or
| columns. The result can be a table of visualisations, for example
| a scatterplot matrix.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGzJ8F9rC1s [2]:
| https://www.tableau.com/products/desktop [3]: it's based on
| Polaris https://doi.org/10.1109/2945.981851
| foobiekr wrote:
| Tableau is pretty amazing but oh lord is it painful to pick up
| someone's work.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I actually like the grid of cells. I had an epiphany: It's just a
| 2D extension of 1D lines of code we use in every other
| programming language.
|
| I think this significantly speeds up analysis and model
| development. I kind of would like this same model adopted by more
| programming environments. 2D vs 1D lines of code. Particularly
| now that we have much larger, higher resolution displays.
| flakiness wrote:
| I guess some Excel users just outgrow the app. It's time to write
| some code in R or Python, along side with Jupyter-like notebooks.
| Another option is to use more specialized tools like Tableau.
|
| The table or spread sheet is not very "visual" after all.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Or PowerBI, VB, F# actually.
| akrymski wrote:
| I think the answer depends on the use case.
|
| Spreadsheets are for general purpose compute. They are glorified
| calculators, and aren't meant to replace databases, even though
| some people seem to use them to store lists of records.
|
| Databases are for storing and accessing (linked) records. In the
| latter case (mostly CRUD) applications tend to have separate
| views for result sets (rows of records) and single records (eg
| amazon search results and product pages). This is a better visual
| data model than a grid of cells (which general purpose database
| access tools such as AirTable seem to insist on).
|
| I have started building something like AirTable with a 2-pane
| view but never finished it. Not sure if there's a business case
| for it, but it sure is fun to think about.
| drcongo wrote:
| I was expecting something more than a shrug.
| lhh wrote:
| I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and
| surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because
| spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many
| types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations
| on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the
| data, and can make various views on the data.
|
| It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies
| boil down to a spreadsheet with enforced structure to the data
| and codified operations performed on the data specific to the
| problem domain. CRMs, accounting systems, project management
| systems, and ordering & inventory management systems are some
| examples.
|
| Our product focused on financial projection & reporting
| (https://www.modeloptic.com/) is another example: Excel-like
| functionality at the core, and since we've constrained the domain
| and know how different pieces of data relate to each other, we
| can automate away a lot of the manual labor that'd be needed in
| completely free-form Excel.
| [deleted]
| InflexHQ wrote:
| I've also seen that there's a whole sub industry of companies
| that build a platform on top of a spreadsheet by assuming a
| certain structure of the data. Aside from myself, Julia's
| Pluto.jl, ObservableHQ, and a few researchers, there aren't
| many trying to invent a new spreadsheet replacement with a
| fundamentally different conceptual model.
| bezospen15 wrote:
| No. There's a reason why Excel has withstood the test of time. It
| will be the #1 productivity tool for decades to come
| xamde wrote:
| Better than a grid of cells? a tree/graph of rows/grids...
| DecoPerson wrote:
| Regarding grids of cells, it seems hard to beat.
|
| If you think of it in terms of energy, where energy is defined as
| some quantity you want to minimise, then it becomes apparent.
|
| Define the energy as the distance of an atom of data to other
| atoms of the same subject (row) plus the distance of the data to
| other atoms of the same abstract property (column). Then choose a
| model; this defines your atoms. You could call the selection of
| the model a discretisation because all models become 1s and 0s
| eventually. If you choose a model where atoms occupy pixels
| exclusively (only 1 atom per pixel) and the XY coordinates of
| each atom is the variable, I think you'll find that feeding it
| into most optimisers (such as a Monte Carlo simulation) will
| result in something very closely resembling a grid of cells.
|
| If you choose a different 2D model/discretisation, such as
| hexagons, you'll find an abstractly similar result if not a
| little unfamiliar.
|
| If you chose a higher dimension space for your
| model/discretisation (3D+), then you may find something uniquely
| interesting, but good luck mapping it to a solution which is
| compatible with our traditional 2D UIs.
| narush wrote:
| Thanks for posting! I love the topic - I've written before [1]
| about how I think spreadsheets are the most popular programming
| paradigm ever, we just don't talk about it much.
|
| I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less
| about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for
| spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful
| programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the
| past 2 years building Mito [2].
|
| Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your JupyterLab environment.
| You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit
| it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it
| generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits.
| Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but
| instead of generating scummy-crummy VBA code, it generates
| Python.
|
| We currently have two types of users. 1) Excel users from a huge
| variety of industries who are somewhere in their journey to
| learning Python - and Mito helps them write Python scripts
| quickly and make that transition easier. 2) Python users who
| prefer using Mito because of it's visual interface. I pretty much
| only use Mito when I'm trying to pivot or graph data - some
| things really just are better visually, especially when you get
| code out that you can edit if you want!
|
| We're open core [3], and also sell a Pro and Enterprise versions
| of the tool with advanced functionality. We've been steadily
| growing for the past year or so, as the product has improved
| (first time founder here!).
|
| Feedback greatly appreciated!
|
| [1] https://naterush.io/blog/Spreadsheets-are-the-Ultimate-
| Progr...
|
| [2] https://trymito.io
|
| [3] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo
| pjmlp wrote:
| From my experience, they are more likely to learn VB.NET, or
| eventually F#, seldom Python.
| mromanuk wrote:
| > I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less
| about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for
| spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful
| programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the
| past 2 years building Mito [2].
|
| Following the article idea of spreadsheet as the best paradigm,
| why you think users should abandon it in favor of other?
| gxs wrote:
| I always encourage and applaud efforts to improve the stats
| quo, I suspect however that if there were a more efficient
| way for power users to quickly interact with data we would
| have found it by now.
|
| In fact, to interact with large sets of data we have found it
| and it's SQL. Again for power users. You data geeks are of
| course an exception and have a completely different set of
| tools.
| narush wrote:
| Spreadsheets are the best way to represent data, but there is
| a very long-tail of tasks one might to perform with their
| data. Requiring all of them to be built into a visual UI
| pretty much insists you end up with Excel - what feels like 1
| billion features, where each user knows <1% of them (and
| costs millions of programmer-hours to build).
|
| I don't think users can/should leave spreadsheets for the
| tasks spreadsheets make sense for (basic data munching,
| pivoting, many formulas, etc). But being able to easily
| transition your spreadsheet to other tools in a easy/native
| way is a huge win - and why at least half of our users are
| actually just Python programmers who use Mito because it
| makes that transition back and forth to spreadsheet/code so
| easy!
|
| I don't think anyone should abandon tools if they are working
| for them :-)
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I might have missed the point but the Mito demo just shows
| importing a CSV file into a common table/grid of cells? Seems
| like a semi-shamless plug that 100% avoids the topic of the
| post: is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
| narush wrote:
| The question of "what is a better visual data model than
| VisiCalc" is just one of the questions we can ask ourselves
| about how to create Excel 2.0. In the authors original post,
| they point out that Notion and Coda answer this question not
| with an evaluation on "cells" and the data model, but rather
| by extending the model to include a word processor. This
| isn't a purely visual change, but a functionality/integration
| one.
|
| There are a bunch of different angles to consider the
| evolution of a spreadsheet, and, as I say in my response
| above, I personally think focuses on changes to the
| UI/display of data miss the point: what's missing in Excel
| 1.0 isn't a better display of data - IMO, it's giving the
| modern, powerful analysis tools that us programmers have
| access to the beginner-end of the programmer spectrum!
|
| Different spreadsheet startups certainly have different
| theses on this. Subset [1] (the OP) seems to focus on side-
| by-side grids on an infinite canvas. Monday [2] (also
| referenced by OP) seems to focus on different "views" for a
| spreadsheet for project tracking, etc. Mito focuses on
| allowing you to integrate Python and spreadsheets as easily
| as possible. Clay [3] seems to focus on spreadsheet
| integrations into APIs/other data.
|
| (Disclaimer: all the above are just my understandings of
| these tools, but I haven't used most of them directly mostly
| am just going of marketing materials... I highly recommend
| you check them out, though - they all look quite cool!)
|
| My post def was a plug for Mito - I'll try and make my
| response to the post/thesis more clearly delineated in the
| future. I think this post is an awesome chance to get
| feedback on our spreadsheet thesis (and potentially hear back
| from OP on this thoughts!).
|
| Rock on, spreadsheets :-)
|
| [1] https://subset.so
|
| [2] https://monday.com
|
| [3] https://www.clay.run
| teddyh wrote:
| "In the days of Excel 1.0 through 4.0, most people at Microsoft
| thought that the most common user activity was doing financial
| _what-if_ scenarios, where you do things like change the
| inflation rate and see how this affects your profitability.
|
| When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use
| serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five
| customers using the product before we realized that an enormous
| number of people just use Excel to keep _lists_. They are not
| entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't
| even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far
| more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us
| to invent a whole _slew_ of features that make it easier to keep
| lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter
| feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user
| features which let several people work on the same list at the
| same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
|
| While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a "new
| paradigm" spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press
| releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which
| was going to blow away everything that existed before it. For
| various strange reasons, Improv was first available on the NeXT,
| which certainly didn't help its sales, but a lot of smart people
| believed that Improv would be to NeXT as VisiCalc was to the
| Apple II: it would be the _killer app_ that made people go out
| and buy all new hardware just to run one program.
|
| Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history. Search for it on
| the web, and the only links you'll find are from very over-
| organized storeroom managers who have, for some reason, made a
| web site with an inventory of all the stuff they have collecting
| dust.
|
| Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make
| lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using
| spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial
| models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that
| making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional
| financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright
| _chore_ , if not impossible."
|
| -- Joel Spolsky, _The Process of Designing a Product_ ,
| 2009-05-09 <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-
| process-of-des...>
| eob wrote:
| I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the
| creator of UltOrg (https://www.ultorg.com/) and has literally
| spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus
| unlike anything I've ever seen.
|
| UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS
| datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations,
| filtering, for both display and data update.
|
| The result is essentially a general purpose app that can display
| just about any Microsoft Access UI that would been written in the
| 90s/2000s to provide editable views into relational data.
|
| I'm not sure if it's a domain as universal as a grid of cells,
| but it's a very cool app and, as a friend of Eirik's, I wish him
| far more visibility than he's gotten for pushing longer on this
| particular niche than I think most people would have.
| [deleted]
| petilon wrote:
| > _UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS
| datamodel"._
|
| That's how AirTable is described as well. And Google Tables.
| And Amazon Honeycode.
| dvdkon wrote:
| This looks really neat and powerful. I think spreadsheets have
| a lot of deficiencies and that many users abuse them, but
| that's because there is no widely known alternative/extension.
| For example, I wanted to create a list of data sources in a
| particular area. It doesn't warrant any coding, this is just a
| simple document, but doing it in a spreadsheet is too clunky: I
| want tags, paragraphs of text, and, crucially, a vertical
| "heading-tags-link-description" structure. In the end, I wrote
| a Markdown doc, but now I can't sort or filter! It looks like
| UltOrg could deal with this, even though it's probably not one
| of the main usecases. I wish Eirik the best of luck with the
| project.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Spreadsheet program with one-click data frame conversion is
| basically Colab + Sheets. Not sure why Google isn't putting
| resources to flesh out this feature.
|
| Between Sheets, Colab/Kaggle, and Google Maps, Google should be
| dominating the desktop analytics space. They just need leadership
| with a bit more imagination. Sometimes I feel like these big
| techs IMPLICITLY don't encroach on certain spaces occupied by
| their competitions. Shadow collusion if you will.
| taherchhabra wrote:
| in the metaverse, you will have 3d tables, x,y and z axis, you
| would be able to twist and turn those 3d tables to get different
| views, join with other 3d tables
| anthk wrote:
| I can do that with GNU teapot.
|
| No VR needed. Heck, you could do that even with a 486 and a
| terminal attached to it.
|
| https://github.com/samuelludwig/teapot
|
| GNU teapot intro from the old K.Mandla:
|
| https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-l...
| boredumb wrote:
| Why does this need to be in the metaverse? Can't we have 3d
| excel sheets currently without the need for VR?
| taherchhabra wrote:
| the experience will be different, something like watching 3d
| content on a 2d screen vs watching it in oculus
| dylan604 wrote:
| we could do that in the 80s when you hacked into the Gibson
| indymike wrote:
| Most spreadsheets are 3d and represent the 3rd dimension as
| tabs.
| AQXt wrote:
| Excel is great for simple use cases.
|
| For complex problems, you should look at Jupyter notebooks.
|
| https://jupyter.org/
| gnramires wrote:
| I agree, I think it's a natural successor to a spreadsheet for
| something more complex. You can even have a section with
| tabular data (i.e. an embedded spreadsheet), which is what
| spreadsheets excel at, but it meshes very well with the
| classical programming paradigm.
| _old_dude_ wrote:
| Jupyter notebook is a regression from Excel, at least Excel
| computes the dependencies between the cells. With Jupyter,
| you have to be careful in the order you evaluate the cells.
|
| And both falls on the floor the minute you want to use a
| spreadsheet/notebook as a library of functions, i.e it's not
| composable.
| Devasta wrote:
| I don't think you can improve Excel too much, but you could the
| ecosystem around it: Microsoft should integrate a package
| manager. Not something public, but something companies can
| privately maintain and publish packages to, that would contain
| common functions for their specific business.
|
| If I could have a way to download a macro to a spreadsheet that
| would automate database connection for certain data sets, that
| would be huge, and since it'd be centralized corps could even
| have critical sheets functions managed by version control.
|
| Mission critical excel spreadsheets run huge sections of large
| corps, we can discourage it or provide tools to better manage it.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I don't think you can improve Excel too much
|
| Clearly you've not used an international version of Excel. They
| translate all the function names, replacing the English ones,
| and of course not just for display. No, this gets saved in the
| file.
|
| So in my view, they could improve Excel an immense amount just
| there.
|
| Then we can talk about how it won't even obey things like an
| explicit "format this cell as text" command.
| willhslade wrote:
| You should be able to do this with Git, Git-XL and a function
| to Export / Import BAS files from within Excel
| yayr wrote:
| there is a reason, why tools like Tableau and Power BI exist.
| Excel fails at building stable solutions for presenting or
| modeling data. Actually, it also fails at stably and
| effectively preparing and transforming data for more complex
| scenarios.
|
| It is great for freestyle. But people want to use it for
| more...
| baq wrote:
| just today found out you can't create a histogram out of a
| pivot table.
|
| what.
|
| i mean, i wasn't even mad. i just sat there, stared at the
| thing and had a suddenly empty mind slowly filling with wtfs.
| InflexHQ wrote:
| I think Excel fails when it comes to other natural types of data
| such as trees, graphs, even arrays or records. It's terrible at
| all of them. It's not relational, and it's not inductive, has no
| sum types, or anything.
|
| What it is, is a very good UI to throw tabular data into and
| modify.
|
| I have a post about it here: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-
| with-the-grid
| eternityforest wrote:
| I suspect tables of objects with named fields may be slightly
| better for a lot of things, given the appropriate UI.
|
| It's way more structured, and doesn't rely on 2D spatial layouts
| that work very poorly on mobile.
| olav wrote:
| Excel is seriously killing humanity. No version control, no
| debugging, brittle support for automation. Excel, to me, is the
| single most obvious sign that we must get rid of the giant tech
| monopolies to re-enable innovation in software.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Time to catch up with modern Excel.
|
| Formula and macro debugging is available for years.
|
| Lambs functions are a thing
|
| Power BI
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >No version control
|
| Umm, put your excel file in git repo if you really need to?
| That's like saying C++ doesn't have version control.
|
| >no debugging
|
| Debug what exactly? If you have vb scripts, then yes you can
| debug. If you just have formulas.. there is literally nothing
| to debug.
|
| >brittle support for automation
|
| Ok, but that's also kind of the point. Excel should not be some
| insane thing where people do way too much. It's a spreadsheet
| with formulas- and that is what it's goal is. People who use
| excel with thousands of lines of VB code should literally be
| using something else 99% of the time.
|
| >Excel, to me, is the single most obvious sign that we must get
| rid of the giant tech monopolies to re-enable innovation in
| software.
|
| There is basically nothing to "innovate" related to excel. It's
| exactly what is needed. If you want to innovate then write your
| own damn spreadsheet that does some new magic you think of.
|
| Why are you trying to overcomplicate a simple 2d spreadsheet?
|
| >Excel is seriously killing humanity
|
| Excel is doing the exact opposite. You are a fool saying that-
| excel is _so freaking simple_ yet _so powerful_. Sounds like
| you might live in academic lala land and have never worked at a
| business where there are a billion different types of things to
| do and simple spreadsheets can generally cover most cases.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| >put your excel file in git repo Binary blobs don't work very
| well in git repos. Perforce might be better, or so I've
| heard.
| nealabq wrote:
| You're interesting when talking about Excel's deficiencies. But
| you ruin your comment with talk about "killing humanity" and
| "giant tech monopolies". HN is not a place to get swept away by
| emotion.
| odipar wrote:
| Visual is all nice and all, but I really fancy the
| 'computational' model of spreadsheets which is very easy to learn
| and apply IMO.
|
| My latest find is the CUE language, which I believe is the first
| 'typed' version of a spreadsheet (in disguise). CUE is like
| spreadsheets, but on steroids!
|
| Here is an example:
| https://cuelang.org/play/?id=r4VXwbEG185#cue@export@yaml
| dragonwriter wrote:
| For almost all tasks, yes.
|
| But it differs a lot by task. The power of the spreadsheet model
| is that it is minimally acceptable for a wide array of tasks, not
| that it is usually optimal.
| mromanuk wrote:
| I think that main strength is familiarity and low learning
| curve. You can easily build and MVP with a spreadsheet.
| Understand your data, relations, patterns. The trap occurs
| later when you need to scale it
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I often use Excel to model data operations before I get to
| programming in pandas, so you're spot-on.
| nealabq wrote:
| And it is a good way to deal with lots of numbers, adding and
| averaging them, looking for patterns and presenting TL;DRs.
| jscode wrote:
| Yes, Excel spreadsheets _frequently_ contain errors that are hard
| to spot. Sometimes those errors end people's careers and damage
| companies. Tools like Quantrix that use multi-dimensional models
| provide a formula syntax that's radically less error prone while
| providing far superior reporting.
| agumonkey wrote:
| a blend of decoupled matrices + join maybe
| nealabq wrote:
| Spreadsheet grids are marvelous for presenting many kinds of data
| relevant to business. Specifically, tabular numerical data (rows
| of tuples with well-characterized columns). Spreadsheets are
| great for condensing and summarizing the minute details and
| aggregates spread across huge numbers of rows, and for
| highlighting patterns and trends.
|
| And there are other very effective ways to present data.
| Hypertext, Gantt charts, and pie-charts for example, which Excel
| also supports.
|
| But we don't use spreadsheet-grids for general programming.
| Programs (as we write them) are concerned with dependencies and
| control-flow and semi-structured hierarchies and naming lots of
| things. Programs are organized as a hierarchy - directories
| containing files containing the nested-pieces of the program, as
| text. And some parts of a program (state-machines, data-schemas,
| GUI layouts, date/control flows) are visualized as boxes
| containing labels with lines and arrows between them (and more
| labels). I'm surprised we don't have generic tools for that yet.
| Attempts have been made.
|
| This is not to mention geometric/photographic/aural data.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I don't think programs are necessarily a hierarchy, though that
| is a useful way to look at them. There are definitely mutually
| recursive elements, though these are admittedly limited in size
| of scope. However, most of the problems with looking at
| programs as hierarchies come from forcing elements to have a
| single parent containing element. Instead of a tree, you get a
| lot more flexibility by allowing elements to have multiple
| parents (so it is still a DAG, but not a tree since a path from
| root to the element is not necessarily unique).
| nealabq wrote:
| For humans, hierarchies are easier to think about and easier
| to format. But you're right: sometimes you really want to
| express your structure in a more general graph. And format it
| more graphically.
|
| For me the most obvious examples are: state-machines and
| entity-rln diagrams (and, for example, showing how your
| C-structs point to each other and how you're using std
| containers and ownership).
|
| Thanks for pointing out that what I really want is a way to
| create/edit a graph.
| rmah wrote:
| When NeXT launched their first machine back in the late 1980's,
| it came with a spreadsheet 2.0 called Lotus Improv. It used what
| we now call pivot tables as the first class data representation.
| I never used it but the demos looked very cool.
| kpierce wrote:
| Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor
| error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely
| on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted
| without validation.
|
| [Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European
| debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse
| of original
| hypothesis.](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-
| the-excel...)
|
| Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge
| improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python
| is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as
| well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over
| time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity
| seems to keep excel in control.
| woah wrote:
| I think that more precision over application of formulas would
| solve a lot. Arrays are mapped over by copying the code for
| each array element by dragging it across a row of cells, and
| the arguments to the formula are automatically mutated based on
| where the code is dragged to. This can be error prone.
|
| More concrete definitions of where a formula should apply would
| be good, for example, leave the formula cell in one place and
| specify that one argument should come from this range of cells
| and the other from this range of cells, and the output should
| be mapped to this range.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model
| combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over
| 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it
| will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use
| cases like Excel has.
|
| Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an
| SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't
| want to upload my 400MB log file. I'll just use grep, or build
| a CSV and deal with Excel filtering.
|
| Airtable should be awesome at reducing the cost of database-
| ifying these random datasets to zero. But the sales constraints
| put it in this niche where it's not the default tool of choice.
| aidos wrote:
| I also think it's just kinda clunky compared to excel or
| Google sheets. Maybe if you get used to it it's ok to work
| with, but I guess you run into the issue that any friction
| makes it a hard sell to those who are used to excel.
| dhruvarora013 wrote:
| Yeah their monetization strategy is extremely puzzling. As a
| casual user I loved their Chrome extension that lets me grab
| data and put it into a sheet in a click but it only lasted as
| long as my Pro membership. All of the advanced features seem
| to be locked behind a subscription.
| bram2w wrote:
| You might want to try out Baserow (https://baserow.io). It's
| an open source alternative to Airtable, backed by a
| PostgreSQL database. Main differences are that you can self
| host it with unlimited rows, it's modular and it's made to
| handle high volumes of data.
|
| Disclaimer, I'm the founder of Baserow.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Baserow is frickin awesome and I wish y'all the best.
| oehpr wrote:
| 100%
|
| I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But
| their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and
| it's just...
|
| UGH.
|
| Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible
| implementation.
|
| There HAS to be a unfilled niche here.
|
| nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to
| a backend postgres database, it can be used along side
| bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I'm
| watching it like a hawk.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Access wasn't even that bad of an implementation. It was
| amazing not just how broadly access was used but the kinds
| of users who could do real things with it. A bit like
| HyperCard.
| theallan wrote:
| We are trying to answer this with CloudTables
| (https://cloudtables.com) - which is effectively a GUI for
| my DataTables library with a Postgres backend. Current work
| is to address the row limit and allow millions of rows
| without needing to contact "sales" (me), while also not
| charging per user (I hate that as a customer). If anyone
| fancies giving it a go and dropping me some feedback that
| would be most welcome! There are some rough edges without
| question that are still being worked on, but I think it has
| some advantages such as being able to self host with your
| own Postgres instance.
| shpongled wrote:
| I just want to say thanks for DataTables - it's a
| fantastic library!
| aaronschroeder wrote:
| Access was pretty incredible for what it is/was. I could
| build a structured database with a nice UI for non-data
| people, reports, and even more advanced things like
| automated emails, exports, etc., in 1/10th or even 1/20th
| the time it'd take to build something similar as a web app.
|
| We had an Access database that managed grant funding for an
| entire public University and in many ways it worked a lot
| better than the SaaS app that recently replaced it. Need to
| collect a new set of data? No problem, give me 4 hours and
| it'll be ready to use :P.
|
| I'd love to have something like Access but that worked very
| well as a platform-agnostic web app and could easily
| integrate with cloud infrastructure.
| p_l wrote:
| Access lacks, IMO, better internal programming and more
| exposure to the fact that you can use pretty much any
| database you can access (pun intended) with ODBC or ADO.
|
| Make it easily deliverable over network, and you have
| killer product.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| VC-funded SaaS wiped out any real possibility of a sane
| business model for a product in this space.
| bliteben wrote:
| Wonder how much the lack of pirating or using a friends out
| of date version prevents ubiquity.
| [deleted]
| conductr wrote:
| > Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge
| improvement to quality...
|
| Would it? At the end of the day, someone else still has to
| proofread and QA the commands/formulas/program or it's just
| blind trust that the decision is being made on. Trust (or
| ignorance) that the creator knew what they were doing and
| developed it in an accurate way before action is taken on the
| decision being made. The interface really makes no difference,
| it's the human component and "process" for creation that needs
| to be fine tuned. Things like the London whale situation was a
| process failure where one person had too much power to execute
| trades without oversight, review, QA, testing, etc. [0] All
| things that are pretty standard in a software developer's day-
| to-day but the rest of the world has not realized or adjusted
| to the fact that they are now software developers too.
|
| [0] Excel wasn't the problem with the London whale at all, they
| made a mathematical error "modelers divided by a sum instead of
| an average"
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| The tools are scapegoats.
|
| The Reinhart-Rogoff issue was technically an error in Excel,
| but also an error by the authors for not actually verifying
| the results before publishing. It didn't hurt that their
| particular biases were in line with the results.
|
| The technical problem can be addressed with more warnings and
| safeguards, but they are meaningless if no one uses them.
| conductr wrote:
| I hadn't previously read up on the RR issue. But after some
| surface level research, I would not say it was Excel as an
| issue. It sounds like the tool did exactly what they
| programmed it to. It seems like human error or choices they
| made to arrive at the conclusion they wanted; which seems
| to be speculated (or true, I only scratched the surface).
|
| > While using RR's working spreadsheet, we identified
| coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and
| unconventional weighting of summary statistics. [0]
|
| I'm not a fan of tools giving warnings for these types of
| "coding errors". Although a warning I can think would be
| nice is where math just doesn't work as expected. The
| recent floating point discussion [1] seems appropriate as
| it's just not very intuitive and as a programmer you need a
| pretty deep level of understanding to know that the
| resulting math is likely not accurate. But, it also seems
| to effect nearly every programming language and is not a
| quirk of one specific thing.
|
| I'd be interested to read more if you have info outline the
| actual error within Excel. If there is some 2+2=5
| situation, I'd be interested to learn about that. I feel
| like every time someone says "Excel error", it's actually
| "human error". It would be like if every car accident was a
| vehicle malfunction but we all know it's most likely an
| operator issue.
|
| [0] http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/work
| ing_p...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856434
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I posted this a few years ago, asking why there isn't a decent
| and flexible collaborative outliner like "Google Trees":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970
|
| The thing that's missing from "Google Docs" is a decent
| collaborative outliner called "Google Trees", that does to "NLS"
| and "Frontier" what "Google Sheets" did to "VisiCalc" and
| "Excel". And I don't mean "Google Wave", I mean a truly
| collaborative extensible visually programmable spreadsheet-like
| outliner with expressions, constraints, absolute and relative
| xpath-like addressing, and scripting like Google Sheets, but with
| a tree instead of a grid. That eats drinks scripts and shits JSON
| and XML or any other structured data.
|
| Of course you should be able to link and embed outlines in
| spreadsheets, and spreadsheets in outlines, but "Google Maps"
| should also be invited to the party (along with its plus-one,
| "Google Mind Maps").
|
| It should be like the collaborative outliner Douglass Englebart
| envisioned and implemented in his epic demo of NLS:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=8m49s
|
| Engelbart also showed how to embed lists and outlines in maps:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=15m39s
|
| Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and founder of UserLand Software,
| originally developed a wonderful outliner on the Mac originally
| called "ThinkTank" and then "MORE", which later evolved into the
| "Frontier" programming language, and ultimately the "Radio Free
| Userland" desktop blogging and RSS syndication tool.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software
|
| More was great because it had a well designed user interface and
| feature set with fluid "fahrvergnugen" that made it really easy
| to use with the keyboard as well as the mouse. It could also
| render your outlines as all kinds of nicely formatted and
| stylized charts and presentations. And it had a lot of powerful
| features you usually don't see in today's generic outliners.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)
|
| >MORE is an outline processor application that was created for
| the Macintosh in 1986 by software developer Dave Winer and that
| was not ported to any other platforms. An earlier outliner,
| ThinkTank, was developed by Winer, his brother Peter, and Doug
| Baron. The outlines could be formatted with different layouts,
| colors, and shapes. Outline "nodes" could include pictures and
| graphics.
|
| >Functions in these outliners included:
|
| >Appending notes, comments, rough drafts of sentences and
| paragraphs under some topics
|
| >Assembling various low-level topics and creating a new topic to
| group them under
|
| >Deleting duplicate topics
|
| >Demoting a topic to become a subtopic under some other topic
|
| >Disassembling a grouping that does not work, parceling its
| subtopics out among various other topics
|
| >Dividing one topic into its component subtopics
|
| >Dragging to rearrange the order of topics
|
| >Making a hierarchical list of topics
|
| >Merging related topics
|
| >Promoting a subtopic to the level of a topic
|
| After the success of MORE, he went on to develop a scripting
| language whose syntax (for both code and data) was an outline.
| Kind of like Lisp with open/close triangles instead of parens! It
| had one of the most comprehensive implementation of Apple Events
| client and server support of any Mac application, and was really
| useful for automating other Mac apps, earlier and in many ways
| better than AppleScript.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier
|
| http://frontier.userland.com/
|
| Then XML came along, and he integrated support for XML into the
| outliner and programming language, and used Frontier to build
| "Aretha", "Manila", and "Radio Userland".
|
| http://manila.userland.com/
|
| http://radio.userland.com/
|
| He used Frontier to build a fully programmable blogging and
| podcasting platform, with a dynamic HTTP server, a static HTML
| generator, structured XML editing, RSS publication and
| syndication, XML-RPC client and server, OPML import and export,
| and much more.
|
| He basically invented and pioneered outliners, RSS, OPML, XML-
| RPC, blogging and podcasting along the way.
|
| >UserLand's first product release of April 1989 was UserLand IPC,
| a developer tool for interprocess communication that was intended
| to evolve into a cross-platform RPC tool. In January 1992
| UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier, a scripting
| environment for the Macintosh which included an object database
| and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its
| original release, Frontier was the only system-level scripting
| environment for the Macintosh, but Apple was working on its own
| scripting language, AppleScript, and started bundling it with the
| MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh
| scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free,
| scripting language provided by Apple.
|
| >UserLand responded to Applescript by re-positioning Frontier as
| a Web development environment, distributing the software free of
| charge with the "Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996,
| Frontier 4.1 had become "an integrated development environment
| that lends itself to the creation and maintenance of Web sites
| and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and by the time
| Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was
| firmly established in the realms of website management and CGI
| scripting, allowing users to "taste the power of large-scale
| database publishing with free software."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
| jayd16 wrote:
| If your data consists of a long complicated pipeline, there might
| be some useful UX coming out of shader graphs systems from
| computer graphics. Shaders transform data in a functional way and
| you can build large graphs that also clearly show the inputs and
| outputs of a transformation. This might be easier to debug than a
| spreadsheet. Any point in the pipeline can be output to a
| visualizer in this way.
|
| It would make debugging, understanding and inspecting the
| dataflow easier, but it would probably make browsing the output a
| bit harder so I can't say it's an obvious slam dunk. Might be
| interesting though.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I have just dabbled with Houdini and what you say (it is not
| exactly a shader but its procedural interface is probably
| similar to what you are saying) is spot-on.
|
| Lots of data incoming, a graph of operations, lots of data (and
| plots, and what not) outgoing.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Yep, Houdini is another good graph/node based data
| transformation tool.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| HTTPS://ObservableHQ.com is rows of cells where cells can be code
| or DOM, input widgets. Cells update themselves automatically like
| spreadsheets. It's is fairly insane what can done and the
| information content possible with these interactive notebooks
| that run normal JavaScript (in a non-linear fashion)
|
| https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/notebooks2021
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| pluto.jl
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think we're really close to one variant I really want. I want
| reactive spreadsheet, desktop, notebook/markdown.
|
| Jupyter has notebook/markdown - it has very hacky arguable
| support for desktop and reactive.
|
| Observable is notebook/markdown and reactive, but not desktop.
|
| Numbers.app is desktop and reactive, and the multiple tables per
| sheet is kinda notebooky, but is missing markdown.
| chx wrote:
| Tangential note.
|
| > But the data isn't persistent enough, we only get recent
| commands, and the location is always moving and we can't easily
| reference older calculations.
|
| You need a better shell, my friend. To quote my .zshrc
|
| HISTSIZE=100000
|
| SAVEHIST=100000
|
| setopt inc_append_history share_history HIST_IGNORE_DUPS
|
| bindkey '^R' history-incremental-pattern-search-backward
|
| The results?
|
| wc -l ~/.zsh_history
|
| 55576 /home/chx/.zsh_history
|
| and I can pattern search it.
| ebspelman wrote:
| Even though current VR/AR interfaces are completely useless for
| Excel or other data-management tasks (no keyboard support,
| unreliable controls, lack of development interest), I think in
| the future there are more embodied / spatial treatments of data
| access that could feel like an improvement on '2D' Excel.
|
| As the author mentions, the original moniker for Excel was
| VisiCalc - a visual calculator. There's no inherent reason why 3D
| spatial representation would be a worse medium for a calculator.
| 1e-9 wrote:
| > As the author mentions, the original moniker for Excel was
| VisiCalc
|
| VisiCalc wasn't actually a moniker for Excel. It was a
| predecessor. It was the first spreadsheet program, which was
| made by a different company, VisiCorp, and released in 1979.
| Excel was developed by Microsoft and released in 1985. Prior to
| Excel, Microsoft had released an earlier spreadsheet called
| Multiplan in 1982.
| anthk wrote:
| Check Visidata.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| There has been a lot of work looking into 3D visualization, but
| it really seems like the benefits are pretty minimal compared
| to the drawbacks. Even 2D visualizations seem to do better when
| limited to a single spatial dimension for carrying information
| (i.e., how pie charts are inferior bar charts in almost every
| way).
| ebspelman wrote:
| I should disclaim that I work on a 3D capture app called
| Polycam, but in that work I've grown used to the idea that 3D
| captures are inherently better at conveying some kinds of
| visual information than photographs are. Like a room with
| graffiti on the walls. The opposite is also true - 2D photos
| are way better at sunsets & portraits.
|
| So I guess what I'm saying is that I'd bet there are some
| undiscovered cases where 3D is going to be better for data
| representation / manipulation.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| That's a great point. I had a VR headset that worked with
| phone a few years ago, and it was absolutely incredible how
| 3D still images have the ability to make you feel like you
| are someplace that you are not, at least compared to 2D
| still images and video. 3D will certainly give designers
| more tools to work with in making memorable visualizations
| which is an important feature for many visualizations.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If the argument is that you need the third dimension to reflect
| of the shape of the data, you're not going to want to stop at
| three dimensions when working with stuff like multi-dimensional
| tensors for machine learning, etc. So any 3D display system
| will have the same problem displaying a 4D grid as a 2D display
| system has displaying a 3D grid.
|
| Of course any >2D spreadsheet or data viewing / editing /
| programming language (i.e. Python / Numpy / TensorFlow / Dwarf
| Fortress / Minecraft / etc) needs to project and slice high
| dimensional data onto the 2D screen somehow, because displays
| and human retinas are 2D by nature.
|
| But if it's a practical question of optimizing for human
| perception (retinas are 2D), engineering (screens are 2D),
| usability (you can't see or click on something that's hidden
| behind something else), and user interface design, then 2D wins
| hands down over 3D.
|
| Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some
| interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells,
| suggesting finite layering in z (depth), but unlimited scaling
| in x and y (2D grid):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468
|
| DonHopkins on Oct 1, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes
|
| Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make
| great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different
| engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting
| things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D,
| which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual
| programming:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585
|
| David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like
| "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First
| Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement
| talk:
|
| https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780
|
| "Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is,
| depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."
|
| "Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build
| the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional
| computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of
| it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."
|
| "So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my
| back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be
| relatively easy to imagine taking a 2D model like this, and
| having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model,
| where there would be a little local communication up and down,
| and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."
|
| "And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that
| you think about things like what about wrap-around torus
| connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they
| say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect
| indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make
| little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has
| other consequences."
|
| Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973
|
| The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing:
| Distributed City Generation:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc
|
| And a paper about how that works:
|
| https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...
|
| Plus there's a lot more here:
|
| https://movablefeastmachine.org/
|
| Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely
| scalable robust first computing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A
| munificent wrote:
| _> There 's no inherent reason why 3D spatial representation
| would be a worse medium for a calculator._
|
| The main inherent reason why 3D isn't as great as it seems is
| that human vision can't see through solids. We don't perceive
| an entire 3D volume, we just perceive the part of its surface
| that faces us. We can obviously get _more_ information from
| stereoscopic vision compared to 2D, but it 's not a full other
| dimension of complete volumetric data. We mostly see a 2D
| surface with some depth information.
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| "A spreadsheet is then the simplest, most organically natural way
| of organizing discrete units of information, the easiest way to
| perform CRUD operations on any type of data."
|
| So... you've basically answered the question here.
|
| "It's been 40 years since the original Visicalc spreadsheet
| program was released, and no one has been able to beat them"
|
| There is a reason that columnar workbooks and spreadsheets have
| been around since humans started writing down numbers and
| manipulating them... it works.
|
| A "grid of cells" does exactly what it is supposed to do in the
| most efficient manner possible. The only "innovation"
| opportunities are making the underlying product suck less, or
| providing analytics/reporting functionality.
| pete_nic wrote:
| I agree. There may be no better UX alternative than columnar
| spreadsheets. Excel shines in scenario analysis when, for
| example, the data comes from your head. I believe Excel has an
| opportunity to improve when data comes from external sources
| like CSV dump from a CRM. I would like to see Excel improve the
| way it allows you to extract data from other systems which
| would reduce redundant effort and decrease the likelihood of
| errors.
| mcrad wrote:
| No power BI users?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, I think many haven't catched up with modern Excel
| experience.
| d--b wrote:
| My own take on spreadsheets2.0 is https://www.jigdev.com
|
| It's mostly inspired from how we use spreadsheets on wall street:
| a frontend for complex data applications (basically a wysiwyg
| interface with a DAG repl).
|
| Technically, jig is an observable notebook where the cells are
| spread on a canvas rather than in top/down notebook.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Oh hooray! I'm so glad to see more docs - I will check it out
| again now.
| solarflaneur wrote:
| Almost my entire career has been spent in companies competing
| against excel, made a good buck too. Not sure how I feel about
| that.
| somat wrote:
| For myself, I abandoned spreadsheets in favor of the relational
| database. In fact, I consider spreadsheets to be a phase you grow
| out of.
|
| Weirdly, I consider visidata to be the best spreadsheet software
| out there, "but visidata is not a spreadsheet" I hear you cry, I
| know, that is what makes it weird.
|
| I guess what I really want out of a spreadsheet is row level
| integrity.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| The key is that you can examine the state of most (not all)
| "intermediate" variables so not only do you know the inputs, the
| outputs, but also everything that happened in between in all
| these different ways.
|
| Your calendar app adds 2 days for tasks? You can just see the
| cell where it says 2 to make sure that variable is set right. Its
| amazing, and we are just catching up to it with "always on"
| variable inspectors in IDEs.
|
| Edit: That's not the only trick: cells don't have variable names
| but locations. You don't have to remember the type (they are all
| cells) or the name of a variable. Its just a location and you
| click on it to select it.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| You can, however, name cells and refer to them in formulas.
| Much nicer to have descriptive names instead of $J$7 for
| constants or inputs.
| chrisgd wrote:
| I think about this a lot. There is a need for more data-driven
| applications to create graphics that are more "track able" than
| excel. I have a series of charts that need to be sent out to
| multiple people (internal and external) each week. Charts, logos,
| tables, etc could benefit from a pipeline but without needing a
| data engineer. Right now, we have a standard data download from
| Bloomberg or another data provider, macros to change the format,
| access to slice, back to excel where the charts are 75% standard
| but might need some tweaking. Bloomberg might not classify one
| company as healthcare but I want to include them so access keeps
| a list or companies I want. That same Bloomberg output could
| include companies some of my colleagues would classify as tech
| companies so relevant for multiple people. No way to see what was
| done last week or changes made to the chart / table output from
| one person to another besides new versions of the same excel file
| (but still no way to see the logs)
|
| Long winded description but hopefully helps describe how
| important excel is but there is still room to grow.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >No way to see what was done last week or changes made to the
| chart / table output from one person to another besides new
| versions of the same excel file (but still no way to see the
| logs)
|
| Why are multiple columns/pages with the various stages of the
| data insufficient?
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Excel includes Power Query which is a decent ETL pipeline tool.
| Closi wrote:
| It sounds like you are looking for Excel's PowerQuery
| functionality? You should not need to bring the data into
| Access, or write Macro's to do what you are doing anymore
| (Macro's were required in older versions of Excel, but not
| newer ones that have the data modelling capabilities).
|
| This effectively is a data pipeline built within Excel that can
| either be edited visually or in 'M-Code'.
| wvenable wrote:
| Isn't this just a programming problem? Build an application
| that accepts the data, produces the result, and has a GUI for
| managing all exceptions? I've build many of these things.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Isn't this just a programming problem?
|
| What seems to be described is a UI design problem. Once the
| UI is designed, it also needs programmed in some form, but
| that doesn't seem to be the problem, just a not-particularly-
| interesting task required in the implementation.
|
| Not all problems that require programming are programming
| problems. (In fact, most are not.)
| wvenable wrote:
| I meant "isn't this a problem that requires software
| development?"
|
| There are always complaints that Excel is a terrible
| solution to some very specific set of repeated tasks. Every
| few months, there's a posting about how all we need is a
| "Better Excel" that would perfectly solve everyone's
| totally unique 12-step problem.
|
| Such a tool is _never_ going to exist. Thankfully we can
| build tools specifically for those problems when generic
| tools aren 't good enough. Not every problem is worth a
| programming solution; there's only so much time and money
| and paying a bunch of people to cut and paste might just be
| the better option.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Bettering a table for data is going to be hard. Calculated fields
| (instead of $L$123, $Total) could be represented in other ways to
| bound to cells. As could code. But honestly, with the amount of
| time people already waste formatting spreadsheets, less options
| is probably a productivity enhancement.
| SjorsVG wrote:
| This is barely an article. It's more of a question. Not what I
| expected.
| Narishma wrote:
| Excel 2.0 already exists, no need to create it.
|
| https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/2-0
| davidbarker wrote:
| I scanned the comments to see if anyone had mentioned Causal[1]
| yet. I'd describe it as a spreadsheet specifically for modelling.
|
| I used it to build a cost model for the startup I work at,
| consisting of around 100 different inputs, and it was rather
| enjoyable.
|
| I was able to (reasonably easily) insert the different AWS costs
| for (for example) SD vs. HD video transcoding and see how that
| affected the costs of encoding and storing video 12 months from
| now.
|
| [1] https://www.causal.app/
| kzrdude wrote:
| Working with jupyter, I'm seriously contemplating around how to
| bring the best of Excel into a pandas or jupyter workflow. Mostly
| for exploration but also making reports, statistics, aggregations
| nojito wrote:
| Check out https://quarto.org/
|
| It's made by the team behind rmarkdown and is easily one of the
| best ways to make reporting easier.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Sincere thanks, will read
| maliker wrote:
| I liked the way Apple did it in their Numbers clone of Excel -
| you can have multiple grids on a single page. It makes it a lot
| easier to have related data on the same page without fiddling
| with the row/column sizes to suite multiple types of data.
| etchalon wrote:
| Numbers is deeply underrated.
| brimble wrote:
| Apple's productivity and utility software generally tends to
| be my favorite around. It's a big part of what keeps me on
| the platform.
|
| Safari? Lightest-weight usably-well-supported browser around,
| by a long shot. Preview? Outstanding for a bunch of reasons,
| including that using it is the only time I've been _happy_ to
| receive PDF files. Pages, Numbers, Keynote? More than enough
| for everything I do, stable, and I like that I can leave them
| open in the background for weeks and they 're light enough
| that I forget they're there. Notes? Not having a built-in
| export function is annoying and I wish I could use markdown
| formatting, but it's _so good_ at everything else that those
| haven 't been enough for me to switch to something else.
| Hell, I even like the calculator better than most others.
| landr0id wrote:
| When I was in university I was working on some biology
| homework and didn't have Excel, but I did have Numbers! I
| quickly became annoyed with how smart Numbers tried to be
| with formatting. It knew better than me what data type some
| cells were and iirc it was impossible to inform it otherwise.
| I bought Excel after losing an hour or so of my time.
| donut2d wrote:
| This no longer seems to be the case. I've always found it
| easy to tell it what format a cell is.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Last time I used it I believe it just crashed when opening a
| large CSV file.
| maliker wrote:
| Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows
| version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more
| performant and stable for me.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Are you using it on Apple Silicon? If so, then Rosetta is
| the reason why Excel are not performant on macOS.
| Office365 for macOS are using x86 code at the moment,
| Office team is rewriting Excel to work on Apple
| Silicon/ARM. They have a preview build out, I'm not sure
| when they will release the stable version. I recalled
| they said it should be release in Spring or Summer.
|
| If you have Excel running, open the Activity Monitor and
| find the app in the list. Then look at "Kind" column, you
| will see "Intel" listed. So that's why Office365 are
| sluggish on it.
| maliker wrote:
| Running on a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip with 8 cores. The Excel
| code on windows got a lot more love than the mac code.
| Probably due to apple's OS and processor architecture
| changes over the last 20 years, whereas windows
| maintained great backwards compatibility the whole time.
| Tagbert wrote:
| The Office apps are now fully recompiled for Apple
| Silicon
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Took me a while why Office is still using Intel code.
| Turns out they have "Open with Rosetta" enabled. I
| disabled Rosetta on those apps and it went to use Apple
| Silicon code. Now it is snappier than using Rosetta.
|
| Thanks for letting me know!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a pig for large spreadsheets on MacOS on either CPU
| arch.
| Closi wrote:
| Numbers is great for lightweight tasks, there just isn't the
| functional richness of Excel there for more complicated
| spreadsheets.
| breck wrote:
| Same thought. That made it something to watch.
| eigen wrote:
| Many things that Numbers seems to me to be better than Excel
| from a formatting perspective:
|
| * Freeze header rows & columns.
|
| * Naming header rows & columns.
|
| * Graphs that don't overlap the sheet.
|
| Things that I find Excel does better than Numbers from a data
| perspective:
|
| * Data validation
|
| * Large tables
|
| * Formula Error checking
| einpoklum wrote:
| "Excel" is just one specific spreadsheet application out of
| several.
|
| But anyway...
|
| * You can freeze header rows and columns in Excel.
|
| * You can place charts outside the sheet with data.
|
| * I'm not even 100% sure you can't name columns, but let's
| say you can't.
|
| So, Excel has 2 out of its 3 "missing features". Just saying.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Excel has been able to name columns for years.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They've always done a horrible job of hiding the dialog
| for managing named ranges. Easy to create them but
| knowing where they are is a PITA.
| woleium wrote:
| you mean the enormous drop-down on the left at the top?
| Where it shows the current cell, and you can type to
| replace the value with a name?
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| You can freeze header rows in Excel. This happens
| automatically if you use Insert -> Table. That also gets you
| the ability to name columns.
| aidos wrote:
| Exporting all sheets as individual csvs in one go...
|
| Recently I've just been using numbers because it's there on
| the odd occasions I need to access an xslx file and, while
| everything is a little different, it's just better.
| thom wrote:
| Yep, loved using this for D&D character sheets. :)
| makecheck wrote:
| One of the things that bugs me about spreadsheets is that they
| encourage people to set up very fragile unnamed things, like "the
| value of row X" or whatever. Then the spreadsheets become
| gigantic and hard to understand but the owners still swear by
| their data. Meanwhile in the back of my head I'm thinking: this
| thing could be _totally wrong_ by now and you have not really set
| yourself up to see that happening.
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