251–260 of 834 posts
https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/move-from-excel-to-py...
I hate solving problems and not knowing how I did it, so this particular experience has stuck in my craw. Trying to develop a budget to pay off debts, my partner made this elaborate Excel spreadsheet and the output was that basically she had no spending money and I had very little, until one or both of us got a raise. It was far more austere than either of us were willing to go. So I started over using a different eq…
Your post is so stupid that someone could make a copy-pasta of it, e.g. "I tried to write a program in C++ but it didn't want to compile, so I spent 90 minutes poking at the code, looking for the error and never did find it. I don't know what the right solution is to this sort of problem, at least for developers. ------------------- "I don't know how to use Excel (most popular spreadsheet program used for budgeting),…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your post is so stupid that someone could make a copy-pasta of it, e.g. "I tried to write a program in C++ but it didn't want to compile, so I spent 90 minutes poking at the code, looking for the error and never did find it. I don't know what the right solution is to this sort of problem, at least for developers. ------------------- "I don't know how to use Excel (most popular spreadsheet program used for budgeting),…
Umm, who is qualified to use Excel if both scientists and economists frequently have errors in their published works? https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/09/07/excel-er...
We did a bit of work for laboratories this year and csv is not an uncommon exchange format between labs. In general almost all exchange formats are text based, with labs saying they will upgrade to „modern xml formats“ at some point in the future. So seen in this context a csv or an excel file doesn‘t really surprise me and should probably also be seen in this context.
XML would fix the max rows issue, but open you up to OOM issues instead!
The DOM for a large XML document will of course take tons of space in memory. The key to parsing XML files quickly and with low memory consumption is to only keep in memory what's necessary, by streaming over the elements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You made two different spreadsheets, they came up with different results, and you're blaming Microsoft for the error? Really? Excel, whether you like it or loathe it, is in such wide use around the world that $300 math errors would have been noticed a very long time ago. I could believe that there are still many lurking bugs with obscure corner cases, nasty floating point rounding minutiae and so on, but I would bet…
I'm not so sure he claimed that Excel can't add and subtract numbers. I think the argument is that even two people can make such a mess of a spreadsheet that nobody can really untangle it later.
Tack on that developers have other, better options, but if you're not a developer I don't have a good solution for you, and that I don't like that state of affairs.
I wonder if this will be added to the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group's (EuSpRiG) horror stories list: http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
I hate solving problems and not knowing how I did it, so this particular experience has stuck in my craw. Trying to develop a budget to pay off debts, my partner made this elaborate Excel spreadsheet and the output was that basically she had no spending money and I had very little, until one or both of us got a raise. It was far more austere than either of us were willing to go. So I started over using a different eq…
You made two different spreadsheets, they came up with different results, and you're blaming Microsoft for the error? Really? Excel, whether you like it or loathe it, is in such wide use around the world that $300 math errors would have been noticed a very long time ago. I could believe that there are still many lurking bugs with obscure corner cases, nasty floating point rounding minutiae and so on, but I would bet…
Those happen all the time, we just only hear about it when the consequences are outsize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your post is so stupid that someone could make a copy-pasta of it, e.g. "I tried to write a program in C++ but it didn't want to compile, so I spent 90 minutes poking at the code, looking for the error and never did find it. I don't know what the right solution is to this sort of problem, at least for developers. ------------------- "I don't know how to use Excel (most popular spreadsheet program used for budgeting),…
This reminds me of developers talking about the git CLI. At some point you have to stop blaming the users.
Millions of people use the program every day, it has its own fair share of problems (like everything), but if random Karens in any corporation can learn how to use it, then you should expect the same from a random programmer on hacker news.
Also, the irrelevancy of the story is comical ("I dont like it, so it must be bad!")
We did a bit of work for laboratories this year and csv is not an uncommon exchange format between labs. In general almost all exchange formats are text based, with labs saying they will upgrade to „modern xml formats“ at some point in the future. So seen in this context a csv or an excel file doesn‘t really surprise me and should probably also be seen in this context.
> exchange formats are text based, with labs saying they will upgrade to „modern xml formats“ Worth noting that XML is also a text format. SGML even can treat CSVs as markup. There's nothing wrong with CSVs/TSVs anyway - it's a concise tabular format using only minimal special coding for a record and a field separator, as envisioned by ASCII and EDIFACT. The problem seems more like that there was no error checking in…
People keep putting the blame on Excel but it supports more columns than most implementations of SQL databases. MySQL for example supports only 4096 columns. SQLite defaults to 2000. That's way less than Excel's 16384.