I am deeply interested in this problem space. If someone else reading this is as equally interested and would like to collaborate, let me know!
Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
181–190 of 223 posts
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#182Excel 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…
* We need better history than just treat xlsx as binary. It is called SharePoint.
* VBA language and debugger is obviously obsoleted. Please don't truncate values on variable pane, etc...
* Aside from VBA, inspecting each expression would help debugging.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
good to learn. I've only ever seen people do panes in a very poor imitation.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#184Trillions 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 am currently working on a CLI that will allow you to query .csv, .xls and .tsv files and SQL tables via plain English.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#185I've been thinking about this a ton lately - I think the holy grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent in power to a Jupyter notebook. This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formul…
I think holy grail is ai-assisted system where you can ask by plain English queries. Something like Wolfram alpha + gtp-3 + erp.
I am currently building exactly this.
A CLI that connects to an SQL database, or allows users to upload .tsv, .csv, .xls files and then run plain English queries against the data source.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#186Even 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…
> As the author mentions, the original moniker for Excel was VisiCalc VisiCalc wasn't actually a moniker for Excel. It was a predecessor. It was the first spreadsheet program, which was made by a different company, VisiCorp, and released in 1979. Excel was developed by Microsoft and released in 1985. Prior to Excel, Microsoft had released an earlier spreadsheet called Multiplan in 1982.
True. Also Excel was a clone of Lotus 1-2-3, not VisiCalc, as it copied its macro language too.
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#187With python backend plus Python lib support no sofeare can beat excel
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#188Earlier 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…
I am currently working on a CLI that will allow you to query .csv, .xls and .tsv files and SQL tables via plain English.
Interesting concept - care to explain in more detail?
Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#189My thought experiment is to jump into a helicopter and have a look at what people and organisations are trying to achieve.
The data in a spreadsheet is not isolated. It comes from somewhere and is usually going somewhere when the work is done (as more data or a decision). Is may even be a real-time flow of data.
If we had a system where data was coming from one or more sources (big data), and then in a process, filtered, combined, cleaned, analysed, reviewed, graphed) then I can imaging a series of tools with a spreadsheet like UI and data flowing between them in an orchestrated way.
Although each tool has a familiar spreadsheet UI, some might, for example, allow data to be filtered but not modified.
A group of people could use this system to achieve some business goal.
After an organisation's data sources are hooked up, then any power users could create flowchart like processes and select which tool to use in each step and then invite others to participate.
In a real system you would expect a real-time flow of data with each intermediate tool automatically updated as new data arrives and then flow onward after a human intervention was made or perhaps just an automated step.
Anyone with access could jump in and get a feed from any point in the system and do their own work with the data.
There might also be some scripts in your favourite language to do additional processing along the way.
What do we leave out:
- error prone copy/paste
- the ability to clobber data or formula's in unexpected places.Re: Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
#190No post body was provided.