Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

subset.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 223 posts

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

#141

Post by conductr »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #130
conductr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality... Would it? At the end of the day, someone else still has to proofread and QA the commands/formulas/program or it's just blind trust that the decision is being made on. Trust (or ignorance) that the creator knew what they were doing and developed it in an accurate way before action is taken on the decision being made. The interface r…

The tools are scapegoats. The Reinhart-Rogoff issue was technically an error in Excel, but also an error by the authors for not actually verifying the results before publishing. It didn't hurt that their particular biases were in line with the results. The technical problem can be addressed with more warnings and safeguards, but they are meaningless if no one uses them.

I hadn't previously read up on the RR issue. But after some surface level research, I would not say it was Excel as an issue. It sounds like the tool did exactly what they programmed it to. It seems like human error or choices they made to arrive at the conclusion they wanted; which seems to be speculated (or true, I only scratched the surface).

> While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics. [0]

I'm not a fan of tools giving warnings for these types of "coding errors". Although a warning I can think would be nice is where math just doesn't work as expected. The recent floating point discussion [1] seems appropriate as it's just not very intuitive and as a programmer you need a pretty deep level of understanding to know that the resulting math is likely not accurate. But, it also seems to effect nearly every programming language and is not a quirk of one specific thing.

I'd be interested to read more if you have info outline the actual error within Excel. If there is some 2+2=5 situation, I'd be interested to learn about that. I feel like every time someone says "Excel error", it's actually "human error". It would be like if every car accident was a vehicle malfunction but we all know it's most likely an operator issue.

[0] http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856434

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

#142

Post by foobiekr »

SebastianKra wrote: post #73

Maybe it's possible to find ways to better represent relational data? Two interesting approaches: - Ultrorg [1] attempts to represent relational databases in an excel-like format. You can build a query by editing the header of the table, and then edit the results in place. - Tableau [2][3] is a visualisation construction tool, where users can describe a graph by assigning properties to rows or columns. The result can…

Tableau is pretty amazing but oh lord is it painful to pick up someone’s work.

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

#143

Post by BeFlatXIII »

DonHopkins wrote: post #119

How about a spreadsheet that's also an outliner? Here's an article and HN discussion about "Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets" that I posted a few years ago about shoe-horning JSON into spreadsheets so it was easier to edit and process. But ideally I'd prefer a collaborative spreadsheet that's also an outliner (which I described in another post as "Google Trees"). https://donhopkins.medium.com/represent…

Like the Google Docs of TreeSheets?

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

conductr wrote: post #141
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools are scapegoats. The Reinhart-Rogoff issue was technically an error in Excel, but also an error by the authors for not actually verifying the results before publishing. It didn't hurt that their particular biases were in line with the results. The technical problem can be addressed with more warnings and safeguards, but they are meaningless if no one uses them.

I hadn't previously read up on the RR issue. But after some surface level research, I would not say it was Excel as an issue. It sounds like the tool did exactly what they programmed it to. It seems like human error or choices they made to arrive at the conclusion they wanted; which seems to be speculated (or true, I only scratched the surface). > While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, sel…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by bliteben »

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…

Wonder how much the lack of pirating or using a friends out of date version prevents ubiquity.

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

#146

Post by p_l »

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 lacks, IMO, better internal programming and more exposure to the fact that you can use pretty much any database you can access (pun intended) with ODBC or ADO.

Make it easily deliverable over network, and you have killer product.

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

#147

Post by Spooky23 »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #86
maliker wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

It’s a pig for large spreadsheets on MacOS on either CPU arch.

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

#149

Post by throwaway889900 »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #50
olav wrote: post #20

Excel is seriously killing humanity. No version control, no debugging, brittle support for automation. Excel, to me, is the single most obvious sign that we must get rid of the giant tech monopolies to re-enable innovation in software.

>No version control Umm, put your excel file in git repo if you really need to? That's like saying C++ doesn't have version control. >no debugging Debug what exactly? If you have vb scripts, then yes you can debug. If you just have formulas.. there is literally nothing to debug. >brittle support for automation Ok, but that's also kind of the point. Excel should not be some insane thing where people do way too much. I…

>put your excel file in git repo Binary blobs don't work very well in git repos. Perforce might be better, or so I've heard.

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

#150

Post by akrymski »

I think the answer depends on the use case.

Spreadsheets are for general purpose compute. They are glorified calculators, and aren't meant to replace databases, even though some people seem to use them to store lists of records.

Databases are for storing and accessing (linked) records. In the latter case (mostly CRUD) applications tend to have separate views for result sets (rows of records) and single records (eg amazon search results and product pages). This is a better visual data model than a grid of cells (which general purpose database access tools such as AirTable seem to insist on).

I have started building something like AirTable with a 2-pane view but never finished it. Not sure if there's a business case for it, but it sure is fun to think about.

Post reply on HN