421–430 of 435 posts
You can build an absolutely massive application out of excel. And people will appreciate it being fully compatible with their own sheets.
People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
I read a thing a few months back about some Western game developers collaborating with Japanese counterparts for the first time, and their biggest surprise was that a whole lot of game data is stored in an Excel file during development. If you want to change an enemy's stats or a physics parameter, you don't dig through config files with a text editor, you just pull up the spreadsheet. Reportedly it made a lot of twe…
As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge. I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small…
End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hype…
The trade-off is that projects which can make an impact across the entire ecosystem (like Hypercard did) must reach a much wider variety of minds, and that's incredibly hard today. However, I can almost guarantee that there are tools out there that have similar impacts to Hypercard within specific niches, with higher user stats than Hypercard ever had. You don't hear about them because the size of the pool has grown so much.
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My understanding of that shift is that the average "user" has become less savvy, because of improved UX and an overall increase in the percentage of the population who are "users". This is because over the last 30 years computers have moved out of just the business/academia/enthusiast space into people's homes (and then pockets). The average "user" can't program a computer because we've been able to bring computing t…
Excel is programming a computer. So was Hypercard. Any UX that reduces user "savvy" rather than enhacing it can hardly be said to be improved. A large part of the developer community has a very static idea of what a computer can be or what programming can be. What does it mean to author in the medium and why have we stopped trying to figure it out?
The counter-example is trite, but it's true: it's a very good thing that I don't need to know how a Xeon is going to reorder the instructions that v8 is going to turn my webpage into after Babel has turned my es6+whateverextensions into something node can actually execute. I can go down the stack and find out if I absolutely have to, but it's a total waste of time otherwise.
I also don't think we've stopped trying to figure it out. We see new languages, new environments coming forward fairly regularly. My instinct is that the reason it seems that way is because the computing field selected for people interested in that stuff early, and more recent incomers are a) people who don't yet have the experience to understand where the limits are; and b) as a population are less interested on the whole in asking those questions, because if they had been interested, they'd already be present. It's also dramatically harder for a single project to become ubiquitous the way Hypercard was, simply because of the size of both computer-using and software project populations. It's a statistical artefact, in other words.
People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
I read a thing a few months back about some Western game developers collaborating with Japanese counterparts for the first time, and their biggest surprise was that a whole lot of game data is stored in an Excel file during development. If you want to change an enemy's stats or a physics parameter, you don't dig through config files with a text editor, you just pull up the spreadsheet. Reportedly it made a lot of twe…
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In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple ce…
I'm intrigued by this, are these standard codified and documented anywhere? Would love to know more about Excel best practices.
A lot of it is just high level stylistic suggestions, sort of like the Python style guide, though some are more specific
The strangest one I remember is: when you are summing a column, put one row in between the cell with the sum and the bottom-most number to be summed. Change the row height to something like 10% of normal cell height and in the cell in the new row, right above the cell with the sum, add a set of dashes (-------).
I don't remember why we were told to do this but definitely remember doing it, and in my next job people laughing at that habit. I think that it ensures that, when you add a new row to the column to be summed, that your sum formula automatically picks up the new row
You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. " It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.…
>little heartless douchebag Steal money from poor people? No problem, just a small fine. Steal money from rich people? Off to jail you go. I'm not saying that what Martin Shkreli did was right, i.e. he did not go to jail for raising the prices on medicine (for which he had good reasons). He went to jail for lying to investors in a sort of Ponzi scheme using new investments to pay off old debts.
The price hike was rent seeking, not stealing, it didn’t depend on any lies, and it was legal. Plus, the goal was to get the money from insurance companies, not from patients. The investment fraud required lying, it was stealing, and it was illegal.
The drug price hike may have been justified with lies, I’m not claiming there weren’t any lies, but buying the rights, hiking the price, and getting the money didn’t require any lying, and it was done in full public view.
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In my 25+ years of using Excel, here's what makes a pro: 1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions. 2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek) 3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :) Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro…
Before you get anywhere near this point, why not just use a real database and programming language?
Short answer:
- Corporate inertia + familiarity + fear
Very long answer (rant warning):
- The XLS was used by multiple teams, from multiple sites, from multiple projects. It drove project-level decision making at the VP level. The person who wrote it was a genius, but there was no documentation or commenting, and over the decade after he left, it bloated Akira-style: many grubby hands had perverted it beyond its original use.
[Imagine if someone had written the most beautiful C++ & Boost (or C & GLib) numerical methods code, and then some boner noob came along and inserted their own bubblesort because they didn't understand Boost ... yeah, that kind of perversion.]
But because it was so important, and fed so many OTHER spreadsheets, it remains like a brain tumor pressing up against a spot so vital it could not be removed. I did a partial conversion to JavaScript and a MongoDB, but that was roundly shat upon because the main users weren't programmers and refused.
This is how very large companies work. (Most of the time.)
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FTFY: "Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database." It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...
Cisco Global Pricelist, there are still not enough lines in .xlsx to cover all their products
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Cisco Global Pricelist, there are still not enough lines in .xlsx to cover all their products
If you're putting the data in Excel's new data model, this is no longer a problem. I regularly have files with tens of millions of rows of data which pivot tables can work against with sub-second aggregations across multiple columns.
What's it called and how is it different than sheets, and when was it introduced? I was using Excel2013 up until I left the project in 2014.