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I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

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Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#101

Post by ryanjshaw »

discordance wrote: post #82
keyle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you handle sharing? The main issue with Excel, and its main downfall, is the sharing of data and versioning, with person X has an older version of person Y by a few hours and needs an email of person X to keep doing her job.

If it's O365 Excel, then you can share and work on the same spreadsheet in a similar way to Google Sheets (seeing other peoples real time cursor in your spreadsheet etc).

Be very, very careful with this. There are some update/race condition bugs in Excel Online that result in multiple users causing bulk updates to incorrectly update the filtered/sorted view of other users.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#102

Post by ChrisCinelli »

This morning I was just thinking how spreadsheets are a great tool that would be worth an blog post.

In the past I built server dashboards on Google Sheets that consume live data through JSON and automatically refresh.

I wrote a real time labeling system for ML to categorize images in less than a day.

I even wrote a behavioral reinforcement system to build good habits that shows in real time the results on an Android widget.

A spreadsheet is a relatively very simple tool that most of the people understand (and often undervalue). It has a lot of flexibility in it and let you build "good enough" interfaces for internal tools in a fraction of the time that takes to build a web UI and they are are easy to iterate on.

You get a lot of value for time invested on a Google Sheet. They are free and from a user prospective do not require any infrastructure to run them.

"Keep things as simple a s possible" is my motto.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#103

Post by LeonB »

function_seven wrote: post #90
beefield wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have quite actively tried to avoid excel lately (which means also avoiding to learn new tricks...), and I am not that familiar with tables. Do the tables: 1. Enforce same data type per column. I.e., if you have a number in C4, you can't enter text into C5? 2. Enforce that if there is a formula, it is applied identically to each row? (By enforcing I mean that there is _no_ way around that short of copying the data t…

Unfortunately the answer is "no" to both #1 and #2. It does do something close to those. Column data types are automatically carried over to the next row when inserting or appending rows to an existing table. But you're free to override it if you want for a particular cell Same with formulas. When you enter a formula in one cell, Excel will automatically copy across the whole column. But you're able to undo that auto…

The warning you receive when a formula is not consistent is a nice feature, and an advanced user will quickly learn to be very sensitive to those warnings, will spot them quickly, and avoid causing them when possible.

To strictly enforce that the formula must be the same in each cell of the column would not be very excel-like, I can't see it being done.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#104

Post by dmitriid »

tsimionescu wrote: post #88
keyle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you handle sharing? The main issue with Excel, and its main downfall, is the sharing of data and versioning, with person X has an older version of person Y by a few hours and needs an email of person X to keep doing her job.

Sharing Excel sheets is extremely easy - you just mail them, or host them in some online place, like SharePoint if you've bought into the whole MS ecosystem like many companies do. Not sure what your point is there. Versioning is of course more difficult, though Excel does support diffing in principle. I expect though that what most people end up doing is simply keeping track of versions manually, same as they would…

> Sharing Excel sheets is extremely easy - you just mail them

Unless the other computer is set to a different locale and your data contains formatted numbers and dates. Then everything breaks.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#105

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #91
beefield wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have quite actively tried to avoid excel lately (which means also avoiding to learn new tricks...), and I am not that familiar with tables. Do the tables: 1. Enforce same data type per column. I.e., if you have a number in C4, you can't enter text into C5? 2. Enforce that if there is a formula, it is applied identically to each row? (By enforcing I mean that there is _no_ way around that short of copying the data t…

1. Not enforced as far as I can tell. But I believe the formatting can be set per-column only, not per-cell inside the table. 2. It's a default formula that gets repeated, but you may be able to override.

[deleted]

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#106

Post by LeonB »

epistasis wrote: post #37
viraptor wrote: post #21

My issue with spreadsheets is that they could be improved a lot with minimal changes, not nobody seems to do it in popular office packages. Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works. Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fac…

I'd recommend watching this YouTube video; it's only one person's take on the right way to use Excel, but Excel has many ways to handle these issues: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

The link is to "You Suck at Excel" by Joel Spolsky, which is an excellent tutorial.

I sincerely wish it had a different name, though!

I would love to send this video to some of my business colleagues inside a large enterprise. They need this information and they would enjou everything about this video. However, it would not be acceptable to send them a video entitled "You Suck at Excel."

If it had a more enterprise-friendly name I would even have a link and description to it in my email footer inside the enterprise. It would really help a lot of people.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#107

Post by ChrisCinelli »

viraptor wrote: post #21

My issue with spreadsheets is that they could be improved a lot with minimal changes, not nobody seems to do it in popular office packages. Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works. Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fac…

I agree. Both https://airtable.com/ and https://www.smartsheet.com/ in my option add some value on top. Unfortunately they are not omnipresent as Google Sheets and Excel.

> Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fact it's too easy to put two tables of data + some random constants on a single sheet and refer to them by H3.

That is a feature. If you can keep in a screen all the data you need, you reduce the cognitive overhead of having to switch back and forth between tabs. Of course if you start needing to add more data you need to "refactor". But it does not seem a lot more different that starting with a prototype and having to change everything to support the features of a real product.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#108

Post by [deleted] »

scottmcdot wrote: post #38
halfeatenpie wrote: post #26

I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations. So many critical infrastructures, billions of dollars in planning, and just systems are built out of Excel. It's amazing. You'd assume something that services millions of people a day would have some more sophisticated and customized solution, but you're w…

Can I ask, what is "critical infrastructure planning"? Googled it, but wasn't sure as it appears to transcend many contexts.

[deleted]

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#109

Post by alexgmcm »

incongruity wrote: post #98
mikekchar wrote: post #85

My biggest problem with Excel as a "solution" is that document control is kind of an afterthought. You've got X number of people in your organisation and they each have these adhoc collections of Excel spreadsheets. Usually the devil is in the details and you'll have one person who has calculated gross revenue one way and another person who has done it another way. The two approaches are never reconciled, but their o…

It’s absolutely fair to blame excel. It obfuscates the code in favor of displaying the calculated values - it’s designed to hide the code - which, along with a number of other design decisions, makes it really hard to build an error free spreadsheet beyond trivial sized cases. Further, its design makes reproducible data practices difficult - in contrast to R or Python which do a lot to separate code from data - and l…

What I hate about excel is if you now need to do a very similar task, again, it can involve a lot of messing about with the GUI.

Versus changing a few parameters in the Python script.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#110

Post by craftinator »

keyle wrote: post #72
mirimir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the same hardware, with the same table, Excel in Windows 7 does a cross-tab faster than MySQL in Ubuntu does. Indeed, MySQL chokes if there are more than a few hundred columns, but Excel just keeps going. And it uses all CPU cores. Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I did that, I wanted a simple visualization of ping-location results for thousands of IPv4 from several hundred ping-probe locations. So that meant…

Meanwhile open any document in Photoshop with a few layers and effects and the computer grinds to a halt, no matter the specs, no matter the year, through the ages. New hardware comes out? Booya, new Photoshop XYZ -> let's put your fancy hardware on its knees, begging for air.

Haven't noticed this problem with GIMP on my Thinkpad X100e.
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