31–40 of 223 posts
in the metaverse, you will have 3d tables, x,y and z axis, you would be able to twist and turn those 3d tables to get different views, join with other 3d tables
Why does this need to be in the metaverse? Can't we have 3d excel sheets currently without the need for VR?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Numbers is deeply underrated.
When I was in university I was working on some biology homework and didn't have Excel, but I did have Numbers! I quickly became annoyed with how smart Numbers tried to be with formatting. It knew better than me what data type some cells were and iirc it was impossible to inform it otherwise. I bought Excel after losing an hour or so of my time.
I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the past 2 years building Mito [2].
Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your JupyterLab environment. You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits. Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but instead of generating scummy-crummy VBA code, it generates Python.
We currently have two types of users. 1) Excel users from a huge variety of industries who are somewhere in their journey to learning Python - and Mito helps them write Python scripts quickly and make that transition easier. 2) Python users who prefer using Mito because of it's visual interface. I pretty much only use Mito when I'm trying to pivot or graph data - some things really just are better visually, especially when you get code out that you can edit if you want!
We're open core [3], and also sell a Pro and Enterprise versions of the tool with advanced functionality. We've been steadily growing for the past year or so, as the product has improved (first time founder here!).
Feedback greatly appreciated!
[1] https://naterush.io/blog/Spreadsheets-are-the-Ultimate-Progr...
I think about this a lot. There is a need for more data-driven applications to create graphics that are more “track able” than excel. I have a series of charts that need to be sent out to multiple people (internal and external) each week. Charts, logos, tables, etc could benefit from a pipeline but without needing a data engineer. Right now, we have a standard data download from Bloomberg or another data provider, ma…
This effectively is a data pipeline built within Excel that can either be edited visually or in 'M-Code'.
I think about this a lot. There is a need for more data-driven applications to create graphics that are more “track able” than excel. I have a series of charts that need to be sent out to multiple people (internal and external) each week. Charts, logos, tables, etc could benefit from a pipeline but without needing a data engineer. Right now, we have a standard data download from Bloomberg or another data provider, ma…
Isn't this just a programming problem? Build an application that accepts the data, produces the result, and has a GUI for managing all exceptions? I've build many of these things.
What seems to be described is a UI design problem. Once the UI is designed, it also needs programmed in some form, but that doesn't seem to be the problem, just a not-particularly-interesting task required in the implementation.
Not all problems that require programming are programming problems. (In fact, most are not.)
If your data consists of a long complicated pipeline, there might be some useful UX coming out of shader graphs systems from computer graphics. Shaders transform data in a functional way and you can build large graphs that also clearly show the inputs and outputs of a transformation. This might be easier to debug than a spreadsheet. Any point in the pipeline can be output to a visualizer in this way. It would make de…
Lots of data incoming, a graph of operations, lots of data (and plots, and what not) outgoing.
I've shifted to Airbase for pretty much anything data sheet related. The ability to have more typical data-flow joins with an easier to manage UX that teaches folks along the way is pretty phenomenal. It grows as you need, but still remains relatively simple. It's one of my favorite pieces of software from the past decade.
This is available in Excel too - you can import data with PowerQuery, perform joins, configure relationships between multiple tables, then output that into a chart, table or pivot table. You can even put slicers on to let users interact with the data.
This is entirely automatable too, so if the underlying data changes you can just run the pipeline again.
But it differs a lot by task. The power of the spreadsheet model is that it is minimally acceptable for a wide array of tasks, not that it is usually optimal.
And there are other very effective ways to present data. Hypertext, Gantt charts, and pie-charts for example, which Excel also supports.
But we don't use spreadsheet-grids for general programming. Programs (as we write them) are concerned with dependencies and control-flow and semi-structured hierarchies and naming lots of things. Programs are organized as a hierarchy - directories containing files containing the nested-pieces of the program, as text. And some parts of a program (state-machines, data-schemas, GUI layouts, date/control flows) are visualized as boxes containing labels with lines and arrows between them (and more labels). I'm surprised we don't have generic tools for that yet. Attempts have been made.
This is not to mention geometric/photographic/aural data.
I liked the way Apple did it in their Numbers clone of Excel - you can have multiple grids on a single page. It makes it a lot easier to have related data on the same page without fiddling with the row/column sizes to suite multiple types of data.
Numbers is deeply underrated.