81–90 of 129 posts
The ideal spreadsheet should be a mix of Excel, Geogebra, reactive Jupyter Notebook (like ObservableHQ or Vue.js computed properties), programmable in Python, C#, JavaScript and/or other languages with the ability to embed third-party widgets like maps or custom charts. And decent data connectors with SQL-like query syntax (including JOINs).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CS indoctrination is most definitely not a failure of education. Mediocre kids thinking they are writing good code because they've written unit tests is. EDIT: Let me explain my thinking a bit more - we can try to categorize software development into two categories: 1. People write messy, unorganized code that is often in the head of just one or a few folks, who are smart but unorganized and often without formal CS t…
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm... This point reminds me of "Portait of a Noob". For people who understand what the codebase is doing, it's more effective to have as much code on screen as possible. For "noobs", since you don't know what the code does, less code on screen is better. Additionally, these 'noobs' like more meta-program stuff like type declarations (or unit tests) which don't…
Has anyone integrated Excel with a db like PostgreSQL?
Banks do crazy stuff with excel. I embedded a higher order functional language natively in excel 10 years back.... http://cufp.org/2009/fmd-functional-development-excel.html
Banks, insurers, accountants; I know a company with 100M euro rev per year that runs entirely on Excel with VBA. Their office car park gate is opened, closed and managed with Excel. It sounds crazy but the CTO is a cofounder and he found it is much cheaper to just do everthing that way. They have been running like that for over 20 years.
Banks do crazy stuff with excel. I embedded a higher order functional language natively in excel 10 years back.... http://cufp.org/2009/fmd-functional-development-excel.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a dev on XL at Microsoft and took a trip a few years back to meet some of our advanced users. I was blown away by their 'accidental' CS education through Excel. They built sheets (debuggers) to debug other sheets (programs) on their OS (excel), and did this not even using VBA. In my own time, I've visited manufacturing plants where I've seen customers send the factory a spreadsheet containing nothing but a VBA pr…
I used to work in the aerospace industry. The engineers had spreadsheets that consisted of three visual elements: Cells for the input and output filenames, and a "Run" button. It had once been company policy that engineers didn't have compilers or other programming tools on their computers (because "we have programmers for that"). But engineers are a resourceful lot, and they did have Excel with VBA.
On the “we have programmers for that”, I see another culprit appearing: IT security, who decided unilaterally that everone else in the 100k people organisation only needs Office and are trying to impose security solutions based on that assumption. That includes application whitelisting, or automatically encrypting all office documents (as a result non office programs can’t consume spreadsheets anymore), etc.
As a programmer, excel would be so much more useful if it allowed you to do things like filtering and selects using SQL or some other code so you didn't have to rely on the UI so much to do filtering.
Google Sheets has a QUERY function which does exactly this. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks, insurers, accountants; I know a company with 100M euro rev per year that runs entirely on Excel with VBA. Their office car park gate is opened, closed and managed with Excel. It sounds crazy but the CTO is a cofounder and he found it is much cheaper to just do everthing that way. They have been running like that for over 20 years.
One possibility is this - the people who mess with Excel VBA are generally very smart folk who just never went too techy, but then got really good at Excel and just learned vba as the next logical step. That means the code might not be kosher but it will be thoughtfully written and encompassing all the practical use cases. Contrast that with a 20something can grad who while competent isn't as smart as that non tech g…
I have many similar annecdotes. Having a good understanding of the underlying domain and what numbers to expect is critical to writing correct models and too often I see dev teams in banks that have no understanding or curiosity of what they work on.
But there are still massive pain points or improvements that could be added. For instance:
- linking between excel and powerpoint. Almost anyone who will show an analysis, whether in a bank, accounting firm, consultant, etc will prepare some table and charts in excel and will want to use them in powerpoint. The link between the two is unstable, screws the formatting, or requires lots of manual steps.
- Microsoft should really look into Apple’s take on excel, with a sheet being a canvas on which you can add tables, charts, the tables have scroll bars if they overflow. Instead of the rigid single grid per tab, where if you show two tables one over the other you need to align the columns even when they have different data types.
- VBA hasn’t been updated in 20 years and it clearly shows. There needs to be a more modern scripting language. I have heard rumors about javascript. Not convinced it’s a great choice, but that would still be better than VBA.
It is great that Microsoft is investing in Office again. I just got upgraded at work from office 2007 to 2016 (we like to take our time, I was on WinXP not so long ago), and I can barely see the difference. They changed some colors, there are menus that open in a panel instead of a modal box. I don’t think a single user cares about these changes (and they seem to have carefully preserved the bugs). And the problemati…