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

Excel never dies (2021)

notboring.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 275 posts

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#131

Post by dgudkov »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

Your task could be trivially done with EasyMorph (https://easymorph.com). We've designed it exactly for such use cases.

Data needs of non-technical people have long been neglected. It was believed that any data wrangling should be done by IT people. So all non-technical people had was Excel. Luckily, the no-code movement finally started addressing that issue with a varying degree of success.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#132

Post by LiamMcCalloway »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

I'm a glass half full kinda of kind, but for excel, the glass is Feb 1st. Please, types would really help. Maybe as a property of named ranges ?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#133

Post by nhinck2 »

shiftspace-- wrote: post #129
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lambdas are awesome but the ui and their management could use some work. It would be great to have a “script” view to manage defined names instead of hacking them one by one. Single line entry isn’t efficient and the default assumption that cursor keys navigate a sheet instead of the formula box, is annoying. I find myself copying formulas out of excel, modifying them in a text editor, and pasting them back.

Related project: https://aka.ms/get-afe

And shift space being the most annoying of all.

Being in a formula writing a closing brace only to have the formula bar explode because I didn't let go of shift in time. Who wants that?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#134

Post by winphone1974 »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

"Several tables and selectively joining them" ... "Enter an id and filter"

Sure sounds like your creating a relational database in a spreadsheet, which is possible but not really the intended purpose?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#135

Post by ghaff »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #79
apancik wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel has some functionality that Google Sheets are missing that is used in this particular use case. More specifically, it has a primitive called Table. After you set up your data as Tables, you can then reference whole columns as Table1[Column1] and it also fills your formulas down as you add more rows. I don't want to defend Excel too much, as it is not ideal in many ways. Nevertheless, over time, I found myself u…

Interesting. It definitely seems like that would fix a lot of my issues, which prompts the question of why Google hasn't built this functionality

Google has, for better or worse (and I'd argue usually for better), created a 90-95% product across Word/Sheets/Slides. Every now and then I run into limitations but the sparseness is mostly a win. That said, every now and then I run into a limitation (perhaps especially with Excel) that I have to either work around or use the Microsoft product.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#136

Post by not_a_sw_dork »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

All concerning Excel Online: - Ctrl+F3 to bring up the name manager (unless its already there somehow?) - the full functionality of Conditional formatting, f.e. not all formatting rules can be used

Both are requiring me to open files stored on Sharepoint via the desktop app frequently.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#137

Post by jsmith99 »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

> it is very non intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all the rows in another sheet that match this rule

You can retrieve an entire range of data with a single formula in either excel or Google sheets. The formula is caller FILTER https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f...

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#138

Post by blahedo »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

I regularly use gnumeric for my serious spreadsheet work because Excel can't keep up, and I'm always a little surprised when I have to send a spreadsheet to someone and I find yet another thing that Excel doesn't do; I haven't kept a written list but here's a few off the top of my head (of varying levels of seriousness):

- Excel still gets very confused if you have different files with the same filenames in different directories. At one point it would even, if you crashed while editing one `grades.xlsx` file and went to edit a different `grades.xlsx` on restarting, it would restore the new one from the old swap file, silently clobbering data.

- Last I checked, Excel can't do a lot of very basic data graphing (histograms are the ones that I've run into most often).

- Some versions of Excel (the web one, I think) will just silently not format text that is rotated, making some spreadsheets completely illegible

- I got immediately attached to CSE formulas once I discovered them---they do a lot of things I'd always thought I had to build a custom program for---but 90% of the time when I build and debug something in gnumeric with a CSE formula, it works just as I expected based on experience with abstraction and data structures in other languages, but then when I bring it over to Excel to share with other people, one or more of the Excel functions just don't work properly when lifted over arrays. Then I have to go create an explicit area of the sheet (or another sheet) for my intermediate data and copy formulas to make the computation work, ugh. I really want every single function that normally takes non-range arguments and produces a single value to map over a provided range and produce an array when dropped in a CSE formula. (PS to everyone: if you've never crossed paths with "Control-Shift-Enter formulas", look them up and they'll change your life)

Good to know about the feedback box, though.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#139

Post by analog31 »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #55
adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

Someone who has extensive experience in Excel but only basic knowledge in software development will quickly realize that they can develop something in Excel faster than they can build it in a CRUD app.

I think this raises another point. An apples-to-apples comparison is only possible if you can do both yourself. If you're not a coder, then you're comparing creating a spreadsheet with managing coding. And the latter is even more difficult to learn than coding itself.

I'm in the middle ground -- can code until the cows come home, but can't manage a coding project to save my life. I am extremely sympathetic when someone has to manage me coding. I'm always thinking to myself: How can I avoid turning this into a nightmare for them?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#140

Post by Enginerrrd »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

Ok, besides python support... The thing I'd like more than anything:

A better way to edit cell with really long function calls.

If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the top and not just in the cell.

Like, sometimes you just need some if/else statements... but try to parse and edit even something fairly simple like:

=IF(AND(LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression5,Other_longexpressionEven with the color-coded parentheses, this is really hard! And God Forbid all those "LongExpression" have a bunch of parenthesis and PEMDAS that needs to be respected.

It's... really goddamn tedious. I lost track of the parenthesis while writing that in this window ...However, if I could just have a little popout window where I could add arbitrary new/lines and spaces, that would make a difficult thing into something downright enjoyable and productive. Something like:

     =IF( 
          AND(
              LongExpression > 3,
              Other_longexpression5,
                  Other_longexpression
Would make things much easier to parse.
Post reply on HN