Ask HN: Excel experts – Formula IDE in Excel (MVP screenshot) – is it useful?

1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc.

2. It looks pretty useful and would help users create a bit more structure in their sheets and calculations.

3. My idea of why terrible Excelsheets seem to be the norm, is that 'build once-use once' does not exist in business. Too often your boss wants you to redo your calculation and after a few iterations, time not spent documenting / cleaning catches up with you in Excel.

Often you also build one workflow and apply it to many not-quite the same situations. Tweak a few cells here and there. Hence custom workflows per worksheet and again, broken (re-)usability.

Your tool would help to start with a more long term perspective, and help in iterating on a sheet. Might even be faster to type, than to click-point and type.

But my baseline response would be near number 1. Plugins from Excel to R and Python exist too, but still all the sheets I see internally, and code even professional consultants come pitching is in VBA or some proprietary format. The Venn-diagram between programming and Excel has no overlap imho.

I have a gut feeling that there is a lot of analysts who use Excel for difficult and heavy computations and who don't want to learn programming but would love to structure their formulas in a more decent manner.

> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc.

I don't agree - take a look at https://www.think-cell.com/en/ they are a company providing add-ins used by big four. They have 350 000 users in 7500+ companies with a revenue of ~50-70 millions of euro per year.

> The Venn-diagram between programming and Excel has no overlap imho

I believe the overlap exists. IMO it's possible to teach Excel users some basic practices from programming (like code review, testing etc). We (I have a company with my friends) actually have created a project that allowed a company write formulas in a simple file which generated a fully functional webapp. They used version control and code review together with unit tests. This allowed analysts build a solution using their knowledge without the need to have programming skills. This is a different approach programming Formulas -> Web application, but I believe an approach programming Formulas -> Excel is also possible.

I thought it would be cool if formulas would pop into little syntax highlighted text edit areas when double clicked (or some other meta-click)

I think having a look at some more complex sheets would be good. (Ask for your company's accounting department I'm sure they have some Excel monsters lurking on desktops).

Is this plugin meant for programmers or non-programmers? The distinction is critical because...

>Inspired by two discussions [...]

You have to be careful with criticisms about Excel made by programmers. Discussion on HN will skew toward the programmer skillset.

The mindset of the non-programmers that use Excel is very different from programmers. To many programmers, the use of Excel looks illogical. It's a spaghetti of dependencies when formulas refer to other formulas. A complex spreadsheet becomes a ball of mud.

Those criticisms are true but they completely miss the reason why non-programmers find Excel compelling: the UI starts with a visual grid of the "output".

On the other hand, a programmer's UI starts with a blank text file (ready for the programmer to type in "do while xIf one studies how all these disparate groups of non-programmers use Excel, the grid's visual immediacy is the common feature that they all prioritize. Diverse groups of non-programmers such as:

- the Wall Street quants playing with rows & columns in financial models,

- the project manager using Excel as a grid for itemizing tasks instead of using MS Project,

- the facilities manager using Excel as an adhoc inventory system instead of learning a database product like MS Access, FileMaker, or MySQL

It's true that Excel is spaghetti but non-programmers prioritize the grid over the resultant spaghetti. In contrast, programmers prioritize code organization (formulas) over the visual grid. These 2 groups are not even on the same wavelength.

Your proposed tool is helpful but it doesn't really address a burning need for non-programmers. For example, your mockup shows the formulas off to the side and disconnected spatially from the cell. That separation is fine for programmers (who can mentally connect things like CSS rules in a .css file to elements in the .html) but not user-friendly for non-programmers.

>Fact or opinion?

Users definitely buy plugins, but these bring significant functionality and often tie-in to additional services. Financial data being the most familiar to me. These plugins, while wrapped in VBA, are often in C++ (again, finance world) for robustness and performance, and try to be as agnostic to whatever nutty layout or logic a user chooses to have for their spreadsheet.

So, agree, with the pragmatic assertion that technical people love Excel as a UI, but they're probably not necessarily developer-technical (could be, given the richness of Excel plugins can have on some platforms), but technical in another field and Excel is an easily hackable UI for what they really want to do, which is mainly, as the OP suggests, using Excel to change stuff and do what-ifs, which spreadsheets were designed to do (as if, to close the circle).