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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?

#31

Post by fifilura »

mcbishop wrote: post #21
quacked wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has the collaborative functionality in Excel Online and in OneDrive-hosted Office-365-subscription desktop Excel.

Yes, but it is bolted on an existing desktop application.

I feel it always lags. I also tried to use their API once to e.g. upload data to a sheet but it was really messy.

In google sheets all this worked just fine.

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

#32

Post by wjnc »

x0x0 wrote: post #26
blitzar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I add up all the costs required that "effectively round to zero" the remainder from a normal salary rounds to zero.

Nonsense, or surely you'll be able to list these costs that add up to, let's say, over 50% of a salary or $30k plus.

(The Netherlands) Pension contributions + employer taxes + office space. First two add up to about 70% on top of gross wages paid. Office space I’d estimate at € 2k per office worker. But indeed, laptops and MS software is cheap in comparison. Bloomberg Terminal comes to mind as a not so cheap software package.

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

#33

Post by zzo38computer »

oulipo wrote: post #27
zzo38computer wrote: post #23

I would want a "zoned spreadsheet", where you can define a zone grid on each page; each row and column of the zone grid defines the number of rows and columns of data in that zone row/column as well as names for rows and columns, and each cell of the zone grid (which is named by the combination of the row zone name and column zone name) has properties such as formatting, protection, default values, etc. Formulas can…

extensions in WASM might probably be easier for portability

I would want to be able to use native code though (with all of the access that is possible with native code); of course such native code extensions would not be possible to add to a spreadsheet file and you must add them to a configuration file instead (both for security and to avoid unportability).

(It does not necessarily mean that WASM is not also possible. If it is, then some kinds of native extensions might be possible to convert to WASM if you want the portability and security that it involves.)

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

#34

Post by zzo38computer »

ithkuil wrote: post #24
zzo38computer wrote: post #23

I would want a "zoned spreadsheet", where you can define a zone grid on each page; each row and column of the zone grid defines the number of rows and columns of data in that zone row/column as well as names for rows and columns, and each cell of the zone grid (which is named by the combination of the row zone name and column zone name) has properties such as formatting, protection, default values, etc. Formulas can…

Excel "tables" feature is almost what you describe as zones. W.r.t non-unicode text: what's your use case?

I am not familiar with Excel "tables" feature, so I do not know how similar than what I intended. Is there a better explanation, available, and do other programs (hopefully, which are FOSS) implement any similar features?

Non-Unicode text, I want to be able to deal with text regardless of the encoding and character sets (although appropriate fonts will be needed in order to display it), without needing to conversion, so that any byte sequences can be used even if it is not a subset of Unicode.

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

#35

Post by mharig »

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…

Depending on your other requirements, you may get lucky with visidata to use Python in a spreadsheet.
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