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Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

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101–110 of 223 posts

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#101
post #90

Most innovative in that space I know of, would be TreeSheets. https://strlen.com/treesheets/ And this software is at least 9 years old :)

It is just one of many mind mapping tools and it misses "calc" part. Looks like more lightweight Freemind/Freeplane.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#102
post #85

Trillions 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-t…

Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB l…

I also think it’s just kinda clunky compared to excel or Google sheets. Maybe if you get used to it it’s ok to work with, but I guess you run into the issue that any friction makes it a hard sell to those who are used to excel.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#103
There is always something better. But the dirty little secret of spreadsheets is that they are so universal, that some way or another, you can force mostly everything somehow into the grid. The grid is the plaintext for data. It's not always the best, but usually good enough.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#105
post #33

Thanks for posting! I love the topic - I've written before [1] about how I think spreadsheets are the most popular programming paradigm ever, we just don't talk about it much. 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…

From my experience, they are more likely to learn VB.NET, or eventually F#, seldom Python.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#106
post #74

I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data. It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies bo…

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Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#108

I guess some Excel users just outgrow the app. It's time to write some code in R or Python, along side with Jupyter-like notebooks. Another option is to use more specialized tools like Tableau. The table or spread sheet is not very "visual" after all.

Or PowerBI, VB, F# actually.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#109
post #74

I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data. It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies bo…

I’ve also seen that there’s a whole sub industry of companies that build a platform on top of a spreadsheet by assuming a certain structure of the data. Aside from myself, Julia’s Pluto.jl, ObservableHQ, and a few researchers, there aren’t many trying to invent a new spreadsheet replacement with a fundamentally different conceptual model.

Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

#110
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB l…

100% I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just... UGH. Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation. There HAS to be a unfilled niche here. nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I…

We are trying to answer this with CloudTables (https://cloudtables.com) - which is effectively a GUI for my DataTables library with a Postgres backend. Current work is to address the row limit and allow millions of rows without needing to contact "sales" (me), while also not charging per user (I hate that as a customer). If anyone fancies giving it a go and dropping me some feedback that would be most welcome! There are some rough edges without question that are still being worked on, but I think it has some advantages such as being able to self host with your own Postgres instance.
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