The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group estimates that >90% of Spreadsheets contain errors/bugs.
I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
221–230 of 378 posts
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#222People here still don’t get it. It’s not that spreadsheet are great for non programmers, they are great for programmers too.
The combination of UI and live calculation engine is unique.
How long does it take to make a pivot table with conditional formatting in Python?
How long does it take to have input validation in JavaScript?
Sure maybe a couple hours. But it takes literally 2 seconds in Excel.
Couple Excel with a fonctional programming addin and you’ll beat a Python programmer on 90% of data oriented tasks you may want to do.
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> it does not seem a lot more different that starting with a prototype People underestimate this point. Spreadsheets are one of the best possible approaches for prototyping data-driven applications, thanks to its dual data/code nature and the ease to build and extend data types (just add more columns to a table); it's like building the application inside a debugger. Non-developers don't have anything else that resemb…
> Spreadsheets are one of the best possible approaches for prototyping data-driven applications,
Bingo. Back when I worked in big corp Excel was the prototyping tool for the masses. If someone in a remote office built something in Excel that solved a problem that was useful to other offices my team would come in and use that work to build a real system. It was great because a lot of the requirements discovery work happened organically before we would even hear about the process/Excel.
Admittedly, we were a small team and could only take on so much work. This led to Excel being used beyond its capabilities which leads to a host of other problems.
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#224Spreadsheets are great tools, but they are not suitable for every kind of problem. I use Excel daily too, but I also use a lot of other programming languages as well. 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.
This is one of the reasons that I use Google Sheets regularly for such tasks at work. The API allows you to do all the hard work in your language of choice and the post the output into a spreadsheet for viewing or other manipulation better suited to spreadsheet-style interaction. We have implemented all sorts of ad-hoc interactive sheets that can be viewed by anyone by emailing the shared URL around. It's a powerful tool for transcending the code-to-reporting boundary.
Love them or hate them, I think Google has done a great thing here. I'll be sad when they decide to suddenly drop support for it ;)
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#225Spreadsheet is great and dangerous!
Try to find duplicates or do vlookup in a table/sheet with more than 10.000 rows. It will only look at the first part of your data, and skip a lot if you don’t remember to sort your columns first.
Yes spreadsheet are a great start. I often ask people to “prototype” in Excel, after that it is SQL that rules.
And remember: Pivot in Excel = ‘Group by’ in SQL
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#226I 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…
"just like riding a bike" - best summary of Excel I've read!
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#227I 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.
Make a new locale :)
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#228People here still don’t get it. It’s not that spreadsheet are great for non programmers, they are great for programmers too. The combination of UI and live calculation engine is unique. How long does it take to make a pivot table with conditional formatting in Python? How long does it take to have input validation in JavaScript? Sure maybe a couple hours. But it takes literally 2 seconds in Excel. Couple Excel with a…
On prototypes? Yes.
On code meant to be shipped and/or maintained? Not even close!
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#229People here still don’t get it. It’s not that spreadsheet are great for non programmers, they are great for programmers too. The combination of UI and live calculation engine is unique. How long does it take to make a pivot table with conditional formatting in Python? How long does it take to have input validation in JavaScript? Sure maybe a couple hours. But it takes literally 2 seconds in Excel. Couple Excel with a…
Why would this take two hours to do in python? Excel is a nightmare for production tasks.
Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
#230People here still don’t get it. It’s not that spreadsheet are great for non programmers, they are great for programmers too. The combination of UI and live calculation engine is unique. How long does it take to make a pivot table with conditional formatting in Python? How long does it take to have input validation in JavaScript? Sure maybe a couple hours. But it takes literally 2 seconds in Excel. Couple Excel with a…
Hmm, I'm not sure about that! Formatting in Python, sure - because it's not designed for outputting colours and type face. But the popular Python package, Pandas, makes Excel-like tasks a breeze. I'll often help colleagues who can't code to do something with their data that is nothing more than a single "groupby" or "apply" expression in Python+Pandas.