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

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

#131

Post by baq »

Devasta wrote: post #76

I don't think you can improve Excel too much, but you could the ecosystem around it: Microsoft should integrate a package manager. Not something public, but something companies can privately maintain and publish packages to, that would contain common functions for their specific business. If I could have a way to download a macro to a spreadsheet that would automate database connection for certain data sets, that wou…

just today found out you can't create a histogram out of a pivot table.

what.

i mean, i wasn't even mad. i just sat there, stared at the thing and had a suddenly empty mind slowly filling with wtfs.

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

#133

Post by brimble »

etchalon wrote: post #10
maliker wrote: post #8

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.

Apple's productivity and utility software generally tends to be my favorite around. It's a big part of what keeps me on the platform.

Safari? Lightest-weight usably-well-supported browser around, by a long shot. Preview? Outstanding for a bunch of reasons, including that using it is the only time I've been happy to receive PDF files. Pages, Numbers, Keynote? More than enough for everything I do, stable, and I like that I can leave them open in the background for weeks and they're light enough that I forget they're there. Notes? Not having a built-in export function is annoying and I wish I could use markdown formatting, but it's so good at everything else that those haven't been enough for me to switch to something else. Hell, I even like the calculator better than most others.

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

#134

Post by dhruvarora013 »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #95
kpierce wrote: 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…

Yeah their monetization strategy is extremely puzzling. As a casual user I loved their Chrome extension that lets me grab data and put it into a sheet in a click but it only lasted as long as my Pro membership. All of the advanced features seem to be locked behind a subscription.

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

#135

Post by dvdkon »

eob wrote: post #126

I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg ( https://www.ultorg.com/ ) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen. UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update. The result is essentially a general purp…

This looks really neat and powerful. I think spreadsheets have a lot of deficiencies and that many users abuse them, but that's because there is no widely known alternative/extension. For example, I wanted to create a list of data sources in a particular area. It doesn't warrant any coding, this is just a simple document, but doing it in a spreadsheet is too clunky: I want tags, paragraphs of text, and, crucially, a vertical "heading-tags-link-description" structure. In the end, I wrote a Markdown doc, but now I can't sort or filter! It looks like UltOrg could deal with this, even though it's probably not one of the main usecases. I wish Eirik the best of luck with the project.

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

#136

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

Tagbert wrote: post #122
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Office apps are now fully recompiled for Apple Silicon

Took me a while why Office is still using Intel code. Turns out they have "Open with Rosetta" enabled. I disabled Rosetta on those apps and it went to use Apple Silicon code. Now it is snappier than using Rosetta.

Thanks for letting me know!

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

#137

Post by shpongled »

theallan wrote: post #110
oehpr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! Ther…

I just want to say thanks for DataTables - it's a fantastic library!

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

#138

Post by jayd16 »

pfortuny wrote: post #36
jayd16 wrote: post #28

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…

I have just dabbled with Houdini and what you say (it is not exactly a shader but its procedural interface is probably similar to what you are saying) is spot-on. Lots of data incoming, a graph of operations, lots of data (and plots, and what not) outgoing.

Yep, Houdini is another good graph/node based data transformation tool.

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

#139

Post by somat »

For myself, I abandoned spreadsheets in favor of the relational database. In fact, I consider spreadsheets to be a phase you grow out of.

Weirdly, I consider visidata to be the best spreadsheet software out there, "but visidata is not a spreadsheet" I hear you cry, I know, that is what makes it weird.

I guess what I really want out of a spreadsheet is row level integrity.

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

#140

Post by foobiekr »

oehpr wrote: post #97
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #95

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…

Access wasn’t even that bad of an implementation. It was amazing not just how broadly access was used but the kinds of users who could do real things with it. A bit like HyperCard.
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