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3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

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Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

MrEldritch wrote: post #13
billrobertson42 wrote: post #4

Excel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.

You jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, people keep trying to use it for things . (And no, that reason is not "they're too stupid to learn how to code") And I'm not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to…

> Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, people keep trying to use it for things

Yes, but the main one is that institutional IT policies frequently dictate that people whose aren't employed specifically in software development roles aren't allowed software development tools, but everyone in the org tends to be allowed core Office apps like Excel.

When it's literally the only remotely applicable tool most people are allowed to have, it shouldn't be surprising that it gets used for a lot, independent of merit.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#52

Post by oldandtired »

Excel has been an interesting tool that has been abused by many different people for many different subject areas, from petro-engineers to asset management to budget forecasting to drug sales forecasting to activity planning and on and on and on.

With a judicious use of vba, many of the tasks above, especially those related to forecasting, planning and reporting can be automated down from hours to just seconds. I have seen inordinate amount of hours wasted by people using excel to do all sorts of tasks that were repetitive to the max. A thinking programmer can work with such people to change those tasks from being hugely manual to simply automatic.

Mind you, the vba that has been written by non-programmers is usually so bad that you don't want to even try to attempt to change or fix it. It is far better to just start from scratch.

It is a tool that can be used in quite novel ways, but it does have its gotchas that will cause interesting failures for businesses that rely on it. But when it is the only tool you have, then you use it any way you can.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#53

Post by sebazzz »

oldandtired wrote: post #52

Excel has been an interesting tool that has been abused by many different people for many different subject areas, from petro-engineers to asset management to budget forecasting to drug sales forecasting to activity planning and on and on and on. With a judicious use of vba, many of the tasks above, especially those related to forecasting, planning and reporting can be automated down from hours to just seconds. I hav…

What we have often seen in the business, is that Excel gives a flexibility and freedom that purpose-built tools often don't have. Want a extra field? Done. Field need to have a date larger then xx-xx-xxxx? Done. Even if the purpose-built tool has some kind of custom field system that accomodates these wishes, there always will be some feature the developers need to build. And that costs more turnaround time (and money) then doing it yourself.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#54

Post by eggy »

chris_wot wrote: post #35
dandelany wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for NASA JPL... I think most people would be amazed if they knew how much “rocket science” was done in Excel.

Given the problems with statistical functions in Excel, perhaps we should be a tad worried?

A lot of Excel's issues are well-known because of how pervasive it is. Python and kin rely on C libraries and other layers of imported packages for numerical work that can lead to all sorts of numerical mischief. Even doing:

  round (2.575, 2)
in Python leads to 2.57 instead of rounding up to 2.58. Everything in our engineering firm is checked by another engineer.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#56

Post by eggy »

sjy wrote: post #49
skriticos2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it usually is "I would like to use some sensible tools, but corporate policy requires me to not do that (because they are not available) - so I have to (ab)use Excel/Office/VBA to get things done." It's not pretty, stable, efficient or really maintainable, but if you are forced to use a hammer.. ps. Excel does some things OK, like drawing pretty graphs on smallish datasets and visualize quick analysis with piv…

I’ve been solving this problem with PowerShell for the last year or so. It’s usually available on locked-down corporate Windows boxes, and you can use the entire .NET Framework, as well as third-party .NET libraries, without admin rights. I’m using it with System.Data.SQLite to build a WPF application at the moment, which will hopefully replace a whole bunch of messy and hard-to-maintain Excel sheets and Access datab…

I love PowerShell for this reason. I had a 100 CSV files, and I needed the first two rows removed to put them into a signal viewing app, and it took only a few lines of PowerShell to do this on my corporate machine. I would normally do this in another PL, but strangely PowerShell's solution further pushed me to look into it for other uses on that machine. I wish there were a good book for this, since I actually prefer that than just Googling quick solutions when trying to actually learn something.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#58

Post by adiusmus »

Jonnax wrote: post #26
wiz21c wrote: post #16

A bit off topic, but Excel has many dangerous features. Is there a spreadsheet that is safe to use ? I just know about gnumeric and LO's calc, but I don't know how goo they are (I rarely use spreadsheets, most of the time to draw simple curves)

Could you explain what the dangerous features are?

Dangerous is mostly the spaghetti business logic that results when excel spreadsheets get scaled up into systems.

“Dangerous” in lighter ways: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM

Nostalgia requires this... https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#59

Post by mynewtb »

Jonnax wrote: post #26
wiz21c wrote: post #16

A bit off topic, but Excel has many dangerous features. Is there a spreadsheet that is safe to use ? I just know about gnumeric and LO's calc, but I don't know how goo they are (I rarely use spreadsheets, most of the time to draw simple curves)

Could you explain what the dangerous features are?

Maybe they meant https://www.owasp.org/index.php/CSV_Injection

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#60

Post by sjy »

eggy wrote: post #56
sjy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been solving this problem with PowerShell for the last year or so. It’s usually available on locked-down corporate Windows boxes, and you can use the entire .NET Framework, as well as third-party .NET libraries, without admin rights. I’m using it with System.Data.SQLite to build a WPF application at the moment, which will hopefully replace a whole bunch of messy and hard-to-maintain Excel sheets and Access datab…

I love PowerShell for this reason. I had a 100 CSV files, and I needed the first two rows removed to put them into a signal viewing app, and it took only a few lines of PowerShell to do this on my corporate machine. I would normally do this in another PL, but strangely PowerShell's solution further pushed me to look into it for other uses on that machine. I wish there were a good book for this, since I actually prefe…

Yep, I could have learned much faster with a good book. Most PS tutorials are targeted at sysadmins with minimal programming experience. I would have preferred something that assumed programming experience and focused on what makes PS different from other scripting languages.
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