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I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

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Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#151

Post by unixhero »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #101
discordance wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This race condition happens often. In fact about every time I try to rely on it with my team. Such a shame Google Drive isn't seem as a "trusted platform" in my client environment.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#152

Post by makecheck »

While it’s possible to “easily” write a computer program that is hard to understand later, the gap is much wider with Excel: many more people can create stuff, and the risk of being left with an undecipherable mess seems greater.

I am also still, in 2019, risk-adverse to these complex file formats, even if they are widely used. I can open a real computer program in dozens of editors and run them on many platforms. Yet with Microsoft’s own SharePoint solution, half the time Excel files can’t be opened: my web browser just hangs and then I have to download and open the file in Excel. That’s just crap.

For me, spreadsheets are also frustrating because they can make very poor use of space (and this happens in some other user interfaces too). I shouldn’t be forced to see only 3 numbers at once on a giant display just because they happen to be in cells that are a million miles away and separated by useless empty/unused cells. This feels like what you’d see if web sites decided to just dump their raw database tables onto the screen instead of presenting the data usefully. My theory is that people are just really adaptable, to an unpleasant degree; I’m amazed when I see people squint and tolerate absurd truncation of data and other unhelpful displays.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#153

Post by kyberias »

hprotagonist wrote: post #146

I would hate spreadsheets a lot less if they were testable. Or didn’t “help” by silent type conversions that skew analyses (which you’ll never notice because, uh, no tests) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pa...

What in spreadsheets is not testable? It's trivial to write a test that opens the spreadsheet in excel and tests any formula calculations via Excel Automation API.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#154

Post by qwerty456127 »

I can hardly imagine what is that which is easy in Excel but hard in Python with Pandas and SqliteiteAlchemy/Pytable/whatever and matplotlib.

What really annoys me in Excel is they won't replace the fossil VBA with Python, F# or a new language designed from scratch right for this. The VBA environment feels fun to touch to have the feeling of time-travelling back to the years of your childhood but it feels quite clumsy in actual programming.

Excel's plots feature also feels fairly weird. I could never make it to produce exactly the plot I want. Perhaps that's because I haven't mastered it but this means it is harder to master than matplotlib is.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#155

Post by mathh »

dmitriid wrote: post #113
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.

Yes, GUI assisted reactive programming.

And that's why when you start to use use VBA or js in Excel, it's a fail.

Excel power users (I am not one of them) know how to solve almost every problem they are presented to, using only Excel. Like SQL with relational data. With orders of magnitude better performance.

Main issue yet is scalability, when the dataset gets too big.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#156

Post by qwerty456127 »

Xelbair wrote: post #127
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…

I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.

+1000. This is ridiculous. Couldn't they at least make this optional so you'd be able to switch this off somewhere in the configuration dialog, registry or command line? I hate localized apps altogether (who even needs localized Visual Studio srsly? I can't believe anybody can be competent in a .Net programming language and relevant frameworks and practices without being able to read English) but localizning some apps makes some sense for some people, nevertheless localizing functions feels beyond reason. I feel thankful they didn't localize C# and command line commands :-)

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#157

Post by l0w »

hprotagonist wrote: post #146

I would hate spreadsheets a lot less if they were testable. Or didn’t “help” by silent type conversions that skew analyses (which you’ll never notice because, uh, no tests) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pa...

Finally, thank you!

Tests, destribution and versioning are my main concerns. I like where the people at stensila are going: https://stenci.la/blog/humane-sheets/

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#158

Post by franga2000 »

Xelbair wrote: post #127
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…

I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.

While I haven't encountered localized names, localized formats make Excel an absolute pain for me.

My language uses the "European" number format of a comma for decimals and periods for thousands separators. Excel tries to adjust to that by using semicolons for argument separators (i.e. ADD(1.5, 3.5) -> ADD(1,5; 3,5)).

The problem is that their locale detection is wildly inconsistent and there isn't a good way to override it without changing system settings. When moving a file between computers, this is an utter disaster.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#159

Post by [deleted] »

kgwgk wrote: post #144
Xelbair wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.

Even worse, the token used to separate arguments is localized. So you may have to use semicolons instead of commas. But in some places you need to pass a string representation of a formula and there Excel will only understand the non-localized commas. Fun all around!

[deleted]

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#160

Post by fzumstein »

keyle wrote: post #74
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…

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.

With a few tricks, you can actually use a professional version control system like Git with Excel, see the slides of my recent webinar: https://www.slideshare.net/xlwings/git-for-excel-files-webin...
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