201–210 of 378 posts
Most of the time, complex calculations are easier to do in a programming language than in a spreadsheet, but viewing them in anything else than a spreadsheet is a royal pain in the butt.
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In my opinion - "No Code" tools will fix this gap to build real world apps yet being as simple as excel. While airtable is just a DB as a service, a real no code tool would have ideally all the basic building blocks: a. DB as a service (like Airtable) b. BPM capability -> to add workflows to the data c. Ui Building to abstract data d. API integration (may not advanced learning for power users)
Excel is the closest we have come to no code tools and its been around for years. Ms Access actually has a fairly decent way to build apps without really touching code, but it requires understanding relational databases enough to use it properly. Most (non technical) people end up using excel as a database instead.
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The monthly fee for Photoshop is around 1/100th of the old retail price. That works out at about 8 years of use before you have to 'buy' the software again. Seems fair to me. And for those who don't like paying for Photoshop - which, given it's an astonishingly powerful piece of software, probably means "people who don't actually need Photoshop" - there's always cheap or free alternatives that provide about half the…
> And for those who don't like paying for Photoshop - which, given it's an astonishingly powerful piece of software, probably means "people who don't actually need Photoshop" - there's always cheap or free alternatives that provide about half the functionality. Now? Absolutely! 20 years ago this was much harder. Adobe used to dominate the market so that you used Photoshop even if you often didn't really need all its…
Still does. Part of the reason is that in the past, they turned a blind eye on people pirating Photoshop. Every kid with even passing interest in graphics or photography got themselves a bootleg copy of Adobe tools to work on; it was an easy guess what they'll be using later, as adult professionals.
One major drawback of using spreadsheets is that it is harder to spot calculation mistakes. A famous/infamous recent example is the Reinhart and Rogoff incident in 2013, which involved their heavily cited paper "Growth in a time of debt". When a research student named Thomas Herndon tried to replicate the paper's findings, he found, after a careful inspection of the Excel spreadsheet the two Harvard professors used,…
Not really-really, you can choose to show formulas in settings. (reading them without making a mess of the formatting/size of cells is another thing, but you can always make a copy and inspect formulas there, "ruining" the formatting). It is still tedious, actually very tedious, but as tedious as reviewing source code.
The spreadsheet is the original 'serverless' programming environment. It allows relatively untrained people to augment their brains to levels that they would otherwise definitely not achieve. This has obvious limitations but I still believe that the spreadsheet is the 'killer app' for all of computing, back when VisiCalc was first released the sales of small computers went up in an incredible way.
The spreadsheet is the original 'serverless' programming environment. It allows relatively untrained people to augment their brains to levels that they would otherwise definitely not achieve. This has obvious limitations but I still believe that the spreadsheet is the 'killer app' for all of computing, back when VisiCalc was first released the sales of small computers went up in an incredible way.
Excel is used for client-side only programs. There are no servers at all. All programs originally were client-side only originally because networks didn't exist.
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…
- Fidelity's "Minus Sign Mistake": loss of $1.3 billion - TransAlta "Clerical Error": loss of $24 million - Fannie Mae "Honest mistake": loss of $1.3 billion
Then you get employee turn over where new employees don't get "arcane" knowledge passed down by people who left and took their spreadsheet foo with them.
Excel does not have "access control", "auditing", "change tracking". Just getting work done is not enough.
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> the fact it's too easy to I'm not sure you fully appreciate why Excel is so successful.
No, I fully understand that this is great for many users and that it cannot be made harder in any way to make whatever mess you want on a single sheet - or excel would die. I only want it easier to not do that. (There's nothing guiding people to better design right now)
I'd rather want it to stay easy, but offer better refactor tools to clean up the model after the fact.
My main complaint against spreadsheets is that, to get a robust and clean model, you must plan from it from the start, negating the main value of using a spreadsheet to begin with. When moving data and formulas around, it's too easy to break the formulas and not even notice.
It's interesting how often people's response to the manifest problems caused by people using Excel in unfortunate ways is to either suggest tools with much steeper learning curves or to suggest additional Excel features. 99% of these problems can be solved by proper training and standards appropriate to the problem and context at hand. For instance: Always separate and label inputs, calculations, and outputs. Documen…
Don't try to fix the user. If we lived in a world where your suggestions were followed Excel would indeed be an OK tool. Here in the real world however Excel has just the right combination of power and usability to shoot off every left foot in a five cube radius, and frequently does.
Processes that are thoroughly understood are easy to automate. Those that aren't, require competent people with flexible tools. Excel is a flexible tool. Competence can be gained through training.