[HN Gopher] Seeing Like a Spreadsheet
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       Seeing Like a Spreadsheet
        
       Author : paulpauper
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2026-03-28 16:28 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (davidoks.blog)
 (TXT) w3m dump (davidoks.blog)
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | I really feel for Dan Bricklin. He should have been richly
       | rewarded for his innovation.
        
         | pphysch wrote:
         | He was, for a time, until others made even better products. It
         | would've been terrible if he had exclusive IP over the idea of
         | "digital spreadsheet".
        
       | dcre wrote:
       | This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was
       | hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and
       | verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell
       | in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an
       | Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single
       | person."
       | 
       | https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
        
         | AftHurrahWinch wrote:
         | "Office, messaging and verbs" was excellent, thanks for the
         | recommendation.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407
        
       | designerarvid wrote:
       | Maybe you're talking to the wrong people? Management consultants
       | spontaneously express their love for excel without being
       | prompted. I've even seen it at parties.
        
         | whatever1 wrote:
         | They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel.
         | Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and
         | vba because they deal with both sides.
        
       | aworks wrote:
       | This has interesting speculation on the future business impact of
       | AI, extrapolated from Excel:
       | 
       | "This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations,
       | particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each
       | previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real
       | about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of
       | time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could
       | not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind
       | to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."
        
         | bobson381 wrote:
         | Hence the title and its hearkening back to seeing like a state
         | - I would guess one of the author's related views is that a
         | rigid, high-modern codification scheme will always miss the
         | magic stuff that fills in the cracks. And you can't go without
         | that without eventual unforeseeable consequences. It's a techne
         | versus metis distinction I think
        
       | d0ks wrote:
       | I wrote this, hope people enjoy it!
        
       | whatever1 wrote:
       | Excel (e spreadsheets) is the best quantitative planning piece of
       | software.
       | 
       | There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can
       | answer "what if I changed that" as seamlessly as excel.
       | 
       | Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its
       | sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | Absolutely. And the data and code being stored all in one file
         | makes it exceptionally nimble for the planning phase. You can
         | generally count on any stakeholder in your org being able to
         | handle it.
        
         | thomascountz wrote:
         | Can you give an example of what you mean by "planning?"
        
           | pphysch wrote:
           | Budget planning, presumably. How much you are going to spend
           | and on what, and what you need to charge for your products to
           | break even or meet a profit goal.
        
         | itishappy wrote:
         | For better or worse...
         | 
         | A single spreadsheet used locally is probably the best
         | imaginable tool for answering "what if I changed that."
         | 
         | That same sheet shared across an organization suddenly becomes
         | a game of "what caused that change."
        
       | satisfice wrote:
       | Was anyone using a spreadsheet to drive automation for testing
       | earlier than 1988?
       | 
       | I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple
       | SQA to lean heavily into that, but I'd love to hear of earlier
       | examples.
        
       | nbaksalyar wrote:
       | I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software
       | engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely
       | possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways.
       | E.g., see AmbSheets [1]
       | 
       | [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-30 23:00 UTC)