I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#111

Post by ChrisCinelli » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

tonygrue wrote: post #43

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 be over the moon to see one change to Excel. Native support for a language other than VBA. Perhaps the CLR. Perhaps Java/Typescript. Just something (optional) for programmers who want to use Excel and not want to deal with the garbage that VBA is. Some workarounds exist, but afaik they require collaborators to also have the tool install, which is dead in the water. I know MS has considered it, I'm still pretty su…

Google Sheet can run function and macro written in Javascript. That is what I use.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#112

Post by tpaschalis » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:34 AM UTC

Spreadsheets are awesome, and I think that another thing people are dismissing is grep, awk and friends.

I get it that both spreadsheets and unix tools might not be trendy, but they fulfill the Taco Bell Programming idea [1]; they provide simple, scalable, and efficient solutions.

Summing data from column B for each unique value in column A would be as easy as

`awk -F ',' '{a[$1] += $2} END{for (i in a) print i, a[i]}' my-input-file.csv'`

Sure, it would take a few tries to get right, but could for example R do something this concise and dynamic that can run in parallel?

[1] http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#113

Post by dmitriid » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:34 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #17

Funnily enough, excel is a programming language. I don't mean VB Script or macros. I mean with the equations, ranges, and constraints - that's a programming languages there. A cell is simply a computational variable (as opposed to the notion of variables in lambda calculus). A named range is a data structure (a struct). The rest are term rewriting

It’s the world’s most successful reactive programming platform.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#114

Post by signal11 » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:39 AM UTC

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…

OneDrive now supports versioning of documents, and the latest Office 365 uses this to offer “autosave” and version history.

I’ve not really dug into the feature but it’s very visible on the latest builds.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#115

Post by asutekku » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

tpaschalis wrote: post #112

Spreadsheets are awesome , and I think that another thing people are dismissing is grep, awk and friends. I get it that both spreadsheets and unix tools might not be trendy, but they fulfill the Taco Bell Programming idea [1]; they provide simple, scalable, and efficient solutions. Summing data from column B for each unique value in column A would be as easy as `awk -F ',' '{a[$1] += $2} END{for (i in a) print i, a[i…

Yes and no. That command is easy to understand/use only if you know what all these symbols do but most excel functions are written in a way most people will understand them without major difficulties.

Grep, awk and friends are powerful (only) in the right hands but they are not at all at the same ballpark as excel.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#116

Post by codeulike » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:42 AM UTC

The thing about finance trader types removing the F1 keys from their keyboards so they don't accidentally press 'help' while using Excel at high speed says a lot about how handy Excel is (and how slow the Help loads)

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#117

Post by Nerada » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

linker3000 wrote: post #64

That's all very well and good, but can I make a plea for organisations to stop using spreadsheets to produce tabled documents. This seems to be endemic for information security surveys and would be fine for questionnaires with preset answers, but when a question starts "Describe..." and wants a full description of your software development cycle from an InfoSec perspective, it's painful edit-wise - even if you can co…

As the guy on the other end who has to read the responses; it's not fun here either. Though, there's movement in the SaaS space that looks to solve a lot of this. Proper text input fields, automated yearly requests for update, audit logging and notifications (x party has responded, y party asks for clarification on question z, etc).

Expensive though, but enterprise solutions always are...

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#118

Post by mikekchar » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

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…

Ironically org mode in Emacs would be better in that respect :-)

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#119

Post by alpaca128 » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

> From there, you can calculate literally anything, and transmit not only the results of those calculations, but the actual environment itself, to anyone in the world, and expect that if they have a computer, they can replicate your results.

...unless they use Excel in a different language than you, in which case it can't interpret the commands or sometimes even the syntax. Like with the german version of Excel which requires ; instead of , as separator for arguments, among other things. This alone makes me prefer pretty much everything else.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#120

Post by thundergolfer » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

dvdsgl wrote: post #6

This is exactly why we're building https://glideapps.com !

Hey, cool idea.

At my company we've built a slack bot that sits in front of a google sheet to manage transactions (eg. borrows) in our office library.[1]

I'd love to know whether this could be a Glide app, or whether we'd run into a technical limitation where we can't have users scan a book's ISBN and have that do a lookup in the sheet.

1. https://github.com/thundergolfer/library-management-slack-bo...