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Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

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Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#11

Post by iheartmemcache »

SixSigma wrote: post #5

While I appreciate the idea.... Use Javascript to replace vba in excel http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-... Use python to replace vba in excel http://xlwings.org/

Yeah it's not really "new". Lotus Improv was doing this 25 years ago, for those of us old fogeys who remember. 1-2-3 was for the secretaries, Improv for the power users.

Also, I know know of plenty of financial institutions that have mod'd Excel with Add-ins to the point where the Worksheet integrity is better than 95% of the RDBMS' I've worked with. Version controlled, full audit trails, access control lists, type validation...

Hell out of the box, you can get an out of the box Excel + SQL Server BI to essentially make an off-the-cuff Line of Business app, completely sync'd, with a Silverlight front similar to (this)[http://www.infragistics.com/uploadedImages/Content/PRODUCTS/...]

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#12

Post by dang »

pikzen wrote: post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

Please don't be mean and dismissive in response to new work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#16

Post by headcanon »

SixSigma wrote: post #5

While I appreciate the idea.... Use Javascript to replace vba in excel http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-... Use python to replace vba in excel http://xlwings.org/

True, but having a feature isn't necessarily the same as having it front-and-center as part of the experience. Also, that JS API you have linked looks pretty verbose and clunky compared to OPs.

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#17

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pikzen wrote: post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

I might be wrong but I think you can use JS in LibreOffice already?

Either way calling it a "new kind" seems a stretch unless it's not as well described as it appears to be.

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#18

Post by angdis »

I like!

One thing that I am hoping for however is some kind of notebook-like interface for doing small, ad-hoc data analysis projects. This looks fairly close to that.

Mathematica pioneered "the computational notebook" concept, and now we have similar stuff with R/Rstudio, IPython/Jupyter, matlab, and jmp. Those are all really nice and powerful, but they're somewhat large in scope and very ambitious.

It would be soooo cool to be able to just make notebooks that contain spreadsheets, related manipulation and analysis code and also text that can render to well-formatted html/pdf documents with really nice tables.

This tool looks like it can get there... if it can develop the ability to render documents sort of like Knitr for R.

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