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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#171

Post by spywaregorilla »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #145
jerry1979 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. Just record yourself finding the bottom of the data set (Ctrl + down arrow), then take a moment to make the code work in relative terms instead of absolute terms.

What do you mean by this? What am I "recording" as the bottom of the data set? My point was that it is very hard to have a dynamic number of rows feed a proportionate dynamic number of rows. Scripting makes it much simpler, but at least with Google Sheet's scripting, the API seemed pretty lacking for that processing (in the very least, it's very slow, since it's running as a very constrained shared resource).

Excel let's you create macros by hitting "record" and then doing the operations yourself. It'll generate the code to replicate the impact of your inputs.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#172

Post by elefanten »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #140
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_longexpression 5,Other_longexpression Even with…

+1 for color coding in top formula bar

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#173

Post by spywaregorilla »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #146
winphone1974 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Surely that's what lots of non-developer white collar workers use Excel for? I imagine there's orders of magnitude more people using Excel for data processing rather than Python or R. I'm well aware it's not the best tool for the job, but yet people are using it for purposes such as that. I wanted to learn more about that experience.

I think no. Most people don't do table joins very often. They wouldn't know how. What they'll do instead is create lookups with VLOOKUP or INDEX(MATCH()) to pull in values from other tables into their one master. And once they have the master flat file they'll use a pivot table for group by aggregations.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#176

Post by pete_nic »

> Excel may be the most influential software ever built.

I believe this to be true in business. Other tech may be more widely used eg “email” but the software is created by a variety of different companies (Google, Microsoft).

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#177

Post by pete_nic »

_dain_ wrote: post #107
dima_vm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by "power queries", but Google Sheets support SQL queries. Would be easier to see on an example.

PowerQuery. It's a tool built into Excel. It's a GUI that wraps an almost purely-functional DSL designed for ETL and data munging, called the M language. You can either use the GUI or write the code directly. It has first class functions and closures and normies are programming in it. It's great. More people should know about it. Btw it's kind of funny seeing so many HN users, many of whom must be working on software…

In this context I’m interpreting DSL to mean “domain-specific language”

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#178

Post by harry8 »

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 don't want this to sound snarky but I don't know how to phrase it better. How is the excel team going at fixing the calculation bugs nowadays after wilfully ignoring them for deacdes? Do you have the management buy in to calculate correctly given that's kind of what excel is meant to do?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

Sometime in the early to mid noughts I recall MS announcing they'd fixed rand() returning a random number between 0 and 1. Someone filled a page with =rand(), set a conditional format, it recalculate a few times and watched many cells turning red showing a negative number. I replicated this at the time. Still?

www.gnumeric.org is what I've used when needing a spreadsheet because of those issues and the refusal to fix them. Annoying ui changes happened instead...

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#179

Post by maximus-decimus »

qsort wrote: post #87
hermitcrab wrote: post #10

Massive companies are run off dodgy Excel spreadsheets. I make my living from 3 completely different items of software (seating planner, task planner, data transformation). I'm sure Excel is the main competitor for all 3. The whole of western civilization might collapse if Excel were to suddenly disappear.

At least 50% of my day job could be described as "replace some guy's Excel file that got out of hand". I'm not even mad, I'll die before excel does.

I'm curious, how do you find a job like that? It sounds kinda fun with clear requirements.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#180

Post by Balgair »

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.

1. Some sort of toggle somewhere for dates before 1900 being supported just like dates after 1900.

I work with a lot of historical baseball data with dates before 1900. Constantly having to do string conversions to math and then back again is so tiring. Every time I port in data, I have to clean it up, and every time it screws up in some new and novel way.

Yes, I'm aware that XL's date automatic date conversion causes havoc in genetic data sets as is. And yes, I know that it would cause further havoc if pre-1900 dates were automatically seen as dates.

But some toggle somewhere that I could just click once and then be done with it would save me weeks of time.

2. Again, another toggle that keeps acutes, tildes, and other letters as separate from their non-marked twins when sorting alphabetically or otherwise processing data.

Currently when I sort baseball players by name, alphabetically, the 'á' and 'a' or 'ñ' and 'n' are seen as the same letter and sorted intermixed. This is a huge problem when dealing with Central American, South American, and Caribbean players. Common names like José are not the same as Jose. Same goes for string comprehension functions or searching.

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