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Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#11

Post by quacked »

brudgers wrote: post #8

Turning it into a polished app requires a significant time investment still. Excel is the standard for a "polished" spreadsheet. It has been in development for about 40 years (since it was released in 1985) and has had the resources the most valuable company in the world can put into a flagship cash cow application. It's-not-Excel is the primary pain point for all spreadsheet applications. Documentation, training, th…

You nailed it. The only thing Excel doesn't have is the well-designed UI and collaborative functionality of Google Sheets. Named tables, VBA, Power Query? I'm never leaving.

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#12

Post by SkyPuncher »

We recently build spreadsheet support in our app.

Our pain-points are almost entierly mundane:

* Macro-enabled Excel files, that can only be run on or by Windows.

* A endless log of Excel files that have errors. Most of these are files that are not compliant to the spec, but have been supported by various software over the years.

* User creating formats and overly complicated/brittle spreadsheet.

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#13

Post by x0x0 »

brudgers wrote: post #8

Turning it into a polished app requires a significant time investment still. Excel is the standard for a "polished" spreadsheet. It has been in development for about 40 years (since it was released in 1985) and has had the resources the most valuable company in the world can put into a flagship cash cow application. It's-not-Excel is the primary pain point for all spreadsheet applications. Documentation, training, th…

Also the price of Excel rounds to zero when added to a professional salary for essentially any profession.

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#14

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

x0x0 wrote: post #13
brudgers wrote: post #8

Turning it into a polished app requires a significant time investment still. Excel is the standard for a "polished" spreadsheet. It has been in development for about 40 years (since it was released in 1985) and has had the resources the most valuable company in the world can put into a flagship cash cow application. It's-not-Excel is the primary pain point for all spreadsheet applications. Documentation, training, th…

Also the price of Excel rounds to zero when added to a professional salary for essentially any profession.

libreoffice calc is foss, reads excel files and has been around for a long time. i used it professionally since 2011 (used open office before that).

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#15

Post by jimmygrapes »

all I've wanted for years now is to subdivide a cell and still be able to reference and style the resultant subsheet without weird embed things, just using the standard formatting stuff. merging cells is a poor substitute and breaks tabular data naming in excel at least

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#16

Post by dharmab »

zero-sharp wrote: post #2

Getting Excel to interact directly with MySQL is ugly. Querying freezes up Excel because it's single threaded? I don't know how to overcome that problem. Also I wish there was a spreadsheet software that was more closely connected with something modern like Python. I want to be able to lean on Python to perform calculation while I have a particular spreadsheet open. Maybe even insert Python code into cells. That's di…

Do you have access to the Beta channel? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#17

Post by gremlinunderway »

If you haven't already I'd recommend this blog post that was shared awhile ago by a devs experience building "Excel for Uber"[1]. Not sure if there's overlap here with their experience, but its an interesting read nonetheless.

[1]https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#18

Post by dang »

gremlinunderway wrote: post #17

If you haven't already I'd recommend this blog post that was shared awhile ago by a devs experience building "Excel for Uber"[1]. Not sure if there's overlap here with their experience, but its an interesting read nonetheless. [1] https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces

Discussed here:

I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37527720 - Sept 2023 (535 comments)

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#19

Post by wodenokoto »

I’d like to be able to have custom functions that use cells as parameters.

It’s often difficult to understand the state of a cell (what is it’s formatting and other rules)

It’s difficult to reason about what the underlying value of a cell is and it’s representation (e.g, 12-nov-22 == 12/11/2022) and what will happen when you change the value type of a cell

At least for excel, scrolling doesn’t follow curser. Cells are deselected when focus leaves a window.

It’s not like any of these are going to revolutionize the spreadsheet.

I think old versions of access had a front-end builder. Now MS have power apps, but it’s not very nice and the backend data store is also not great.

A spreadsheet backed app builder would be nice.

I wish I could name cells, such that my

Re: Ask HN: What are your most common tasks and painpoints in spreadsheet software?

#20

Post by atoav »

wodenokoto wrote: post #19

I’d like to be able to have custom functions that use cells as parameters. It’s often difficult to understand the state of a cell (what is it’s formatting and other rules) It’s difficult to reason about what the underlying value of a cell is and it’s representation (e.g, 12-nov-22 == 12/11/2022) and what will happen when you change the value type of a cell At least for excel, scrolling doesn’t follow curser. Cells ar…

Having coding/logic more decoupled from visuals/styling would be interesting.

E.g. allowing the application to be more visually clear when describing states of cells and the relationships between them, while giving one more freedom in the way those cells are then displayed.

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