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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?

#201

Post by gervwyk »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #176
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…

I don't feel that Python is out of reach for most who are using Excel with vlookups. I do feel that most Pandas code is poorly written and thus not at all compelling to replace Excel. (My background is that I teach Python and Data Science to large corps.)

Not sure I agree, but interesting, so who is your target audience in large corps?

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

#202

Post by tony-allan »

tony-allan wrote: post #189

My 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, filte…

Here is a notebook version of what I was thinking... https://observablehq.com/

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

#204

Post by conductr »

Psyladine wrote: post #174
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…

Go farther. Would the results have ever been validated if the source of truth was not a universal format easily interpretable by millions?

I think what you're touching on is complexity and how many people tend to trust complexity because it's too difficult to validate and you must know what you're doing if you built something so complex.

Even in a corporate environment, I use spreadsheets to support big decisions every day, the format is as you say universal and easily interpretable, but many people never go that far. They trust that I did it correctly and take the "output" as truth. If I screw up big ($), it might cost me my job, but is it really my fault if nobody else even bothered to check my work?

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

#205

Post by paulfitz »

mackrevinack wrote: post #195
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…

apparently grist can handle 100,000 rows, and that's just a soft limit so you might be able to do more. being able to have an excel grid and a chart view on the same page would probably suit your use case as well. being able to use python for the formulas is a nice touch too. the free hosted version has almost all features available as far as i remember. there's also a docker version that's easy to get up and running…

Also Grist isn't limited to the grid visual model https://twitter.com/dsagal0/status/1509924813837635593 (disclaimer1: grist employee) (disclaimer2: April 1)

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

#206

Post by __mharrison__ »

gervwyk wrote: post #201
__mharrison__ wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel that Python is out of reach for most who are using Excel with vlookups. I do feel that most Pandas code is poorly written and thus not at all compelling to replace Excel. (My background is that I teach Python and Data Science to large corps.)

Not sure I agree, but interesting, so who is your target audience in large corps?

Are you disagreeing with "excel is programming" or "most pandas code is bad"?

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

#207

Post by debug-desperado »

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…

Looks like what I've always wished for in sheets, more in line with what programmers would like to work with rather than AirTable and SmartSheets.

Wish there were some way to take it for a spin without having to "Request Access".

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

#208

Post by kzrdude »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #175
kzrdude wrote: post #7

Working with jupyter, I'm seriously contemplating around how to bring the best of Excel into a pandas or jupyter workflow. Mostly for exploration but also making reports, statistics, aggregations

(I'm pretty biased since I wrote a book on this, Effective Pandas.) My take is that if you embrace the limitation of chaining in Pandas it will force you to write better (easier to read, debug, deploy, share, collaborate) code. Also works for exploration, reports, stats, aggregations. (Many examples here https://store.metasnake.com/ )

I can't look very deeply into your link and see what the courses actually say, from here, so I'm not sure. I think you want to teach me to be better at pandas. That's fine and I learn pandas constantly, but not what I'm talking about. I want to mix in a different way of working with data, getting some of the best features of excel into the notebook workflow.

I also believe that getting to know your data means reading it in a grid, not just looking at aggregations. Both are important, and with aggregations you can miss important things! Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

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

#209

Post by d--b »

tunesmith wrote: post #164
d--b wrote: post #117

My own take on spreadsheets2.0 is https://www.jigdev.com It's mostly inspired from how we use spreadsheets on wall street: a frontend for complex data applications (basically a wysiwyg interface with a DAG repl). Technically, jig is an observable notebook where the cells are spread on a canvas rather than in top/down notebook.

Oh hooray! I'm so glad to see more docs - I will check it out again now.

Cool! Please let know what you think/wish/like/dislike.

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

#210

Post by InflexHQ »

bradrn wrote: post #165

For a while now I’ve been experimenting with the idea of a strongly typed spreadsheet. There is no grid model; instead computation occurs in discrete cells, where each cell can store one value, with ‘value’ defined as in programming languages to include data structures like lists and tables. Each cell gets its own type, and the formula language is type-checked before running, to allow flexible yet error-checked repre…

See my app for an implementation of this.
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