No. There's a reason why Excel has withstood the test of time. It will be the #1 productivity tool for decades to come
Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
81–90 of 223 posts
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#82Even though current VR/AR interfaces are completely useless for Excel or other data-management tasks (no keyboard support, unreliable controls, lack of development interest), I think in the future there are more embodied / spatial treatments of data access that could feel like an improvement on '2D' Excel. As the author mentions, the original moniker for Excel was VisiCalc - a visual calculator. There's no inherent r…
> There's no inherent reason why 3D spatial representation would be a worse medium for a calculator.
The main inherent reason why 3D isn't as great as it seems is that human vision can't see through solids. We don't perceive an entire 3D volume, we just perceive the part of its surface that faces us. We can obviously get more information from stereoscopic vision compared to 2D, but it's not a full other dimension of complete volumetric data. We mostly see a 2D surface with some depth information.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#83I 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.
Many things that Numbers seems to me to be better than Excel from a formatting perspective:
* Freeze header rows & columns.
* Naming header rows & columns.
* Graphs that don't overlap the sheet.
Things that I find Excel does better than Numbers from a data perspective:
* Data validation
* Large tables
* Formula Error checking
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#84Spreadsheet grids are marvelous for presenting many kinds of data relevant to business. Specifically, tabular numerical data (rows of tuples with well-characterized columns). Spreadsheets are great for condensing and summarizing the minute details and aggregates spread across huge numbers of rows, and for highlighting patterns and trends. And there are other very effective ways to present data. Hypertext, Gantt chart…
I don't think programs are necessarily a hierarchy, though that is a useful way to look at them. There are definitely mutually recursive elements, though these are admittedly limited in size of scope. However, most of the problems with looking at programs as hierarchies come from forcing elements to have a single parent containing element. Instead of a tree, you get a lot more flexibility by allowing elements to have…
For humans, hierarchies are easier to think about and easier to format. But you're right: sometimes you really want to express your structure in a more general graph. And format it more graphically.
For me the most obvious examples are: state-machines and entity-rln diagrams (and, for example, showing how your C-structs point to each other and how you're using std containers and ownership).
Thanks for pointing out that what I really want is a way to create/edit a graph.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#85Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted without validation.
[Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse of original hypothesis.](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...)
Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity seems to keep excel in control.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last time I used it I believe it just crashed when opening a large CSV file.
Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more performant and stable for me.
Are you using it on Apple Silicon? If so, then Rosetta is the reason why Excel are not performant on macOS. Office365 for macOS are using x86 code at the moment, Office team is rewriting Excel to work on Apple Silicon/ARM. They have a preview build out, I'm not sure when they will release the stable version. I recalled they said it should be release in Spring or Summer.
If you have Excel running, open the Activity Monitor and find the app in the list. Then look at "Kind" column, you will see "Intel" listed. So that's why Office365 are sluggish on it.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#87I 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.
Many things that Numbers seems to me to be better than Excel from a formatting perspective: * Freeze header rows & columns. * Naming header rows & columns. * Graphs that don't overlap the sheet. Things that I find Excel does better than Numbers from a data perspective: * Data validation * Large tables * Formula Error checking
You can freeze header rows in Excel. This happens automatically if you use Insert -> Table. That also gets you the ability to name columns.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more performant and stable for me.
Are you using it on Apple Silicon? If so, then Rosetta is the reason why Excel are not performant on macOS. Office365 for macOS are using x86 code at the moment, Office team is rewriting Excel to work on Apple Silicon/ARM. They have a preview build out, I'm not sure when they will release the stable version. I recalled they said it should be release in Spring or Summer. If you have Excel running, open the Activity Mo…
Running on a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip with 8 cores. The Excel code on windows got a lot more love than the mac code. Probably due to apple's OS and processor architecture changes over the last 20 years, whereas windows maintained great backwards compatibility the whole time.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#89I 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.
Many things that Numbers seems to me to be better than Excel from a formatting perspective: * Freeze header rows & columns. * Naming header rows & columns. * Graphs that don't overlap the sheet. Things that I find Excel does better than Numbers from a data perspective: * Data validation * Large tables * Formula Error checking
"Excel" is just one specific spreadsheet application out of several.
But anyway...
* You can freeze header rows and columns in Excel.
* You can place charts outside the sheet with data.
* I'm not even 100% sure you can't name columns, but let's say you can't.
So, Excel has 2 out of its 3 "missing features". Just saying.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#90Most innovative in that space I know of, would be TreeSheets.
https://strlen.com/treesheets/
And this software is at least 9 years old :)