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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#261

Post by Enginerrrd »

_dain_ wrote: post #258
Enginerrrd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you know about the LET function? It lets you make lexically scoped variables. And the IFS function is basically an if-elif(-elif...)-else chain, eliminating nested IF. So your example would be: =LET( foo, LongExpression, bar, OtherLongExpression, baz, AnotherLongExpression, bax, YetAnotherLongExpression IFS( AND(foo > 3, bar 5, bar The formula bar can be resized and you can insert new lines with alt-enter. Sadly t…

Hey, this is all incredibly helpful!

LET alone will be very helpful for all the empirical fluid mechanics formulas I have to deal with.

Thanks a lot friend!

Also, just out of curiosity, why do you recommend that particular bracket style?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#262

Post by D13Fd »

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.

Dark mode in the web version please!

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#263

Post by D13Fd »

aargh_aargh wrote: post #117
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.

Bring back Access. I understand it needs to be rebuilt, so probably build it on top of sqlite. There's nothing (popular) in the niche left by Access.

I love excel, but Access is a nightmare by comparison. It sits in exactly the wrong spot on the power/usability curve. It it's super easy to create a crappy database and hard to make a good one.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#264

Post by D13Fd »

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.

Also, an option to make arrow keys always move the text cursor in the formula bar and never select cells would be great!

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#265

Post by D13Fd »

pillefitz wrote: post #202
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.

A simple way to connect to the cloud. We're moving all apps to the cloud, but users prefer to use Excel for most tasks. It's not clear to me how to handle MFA or AWS auth challenges in Excel, and we typically end up using Xlwings or similar, which is not very nice.

Office 365 is the answer to this. Simultaneous editing is pretty incredible and seamless, as is versioning and instant save. Trying to hack in some third party solution is never going to be as good.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#266

Post by [deleted] »

taviso wrote: post #260
_dain_ wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task. It's true that Google sheets and LibreOffice don't have Powerquery, and that's a big pain. B…

You need to come up with a task that cannot be accomplished, remember you said "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", but so far I've seen no examples. I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you? You can replicate the exact example you gave with named ranges. If there is something it can do that named ranges can't, then please use that example instead. Similarly, if you think there is…

[deleted]

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#267

Post by _dain_ »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #261
_dain_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about the LET function? It lets you make lexically scoped variables. And the IFS function is basically an if-elif(-elif...)-else chain, eliminating nested IF. So your example would be: =LET( foo, LongExpression, bar, OtherLongExpression, baz, AnotherLongExpression, bax, YetAnotherLongExpression IFS( AND(foo > 3, bar 5, bar The formula bar can be resized and you can insert new lines with alt-enter. Sadly t…

Hey, this is all incredibly helpful! LET alone will be very helpful for all the empirical fluid mechanics formulas I have to deal with. Thanks a lot friend! Also, just out of curiosity, why do you recommend that particular bracket style?

Vertical space is at a premium, no sense in having lines with nothing but a single close paren. You don't want to drag down the formula bar and start hearing the Star Wars title crawl music in your head.

It's worth checking out the big alphabetical list of formulae, there's a lot of things that many people don't know are there. Look at the ones with the "Office 365" or "2019" labels for recently added ones (although annoyingly those are icons rather than text so you can't ctrl-f):

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-functions-a...

Also check out my other comment in this thread about tables if you don't already know what those are all about. And Powerquery too.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#268

Post by _dain_ »

taviso wrote: post #260
_dain_ wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task. It's true that Google sheets and LibreOffice don't have Powerquery, and that's a big pain. B…

You need to come up with a task that cannot be accomplished, remember you said "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", but so far I've seen no examples. I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you? You can replicate the exact example you gave with named ranges. If there is something it can do that named ranges can't, then please use that example instead. Similarly, if you think there is…

>I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you?

No, named ranges don't automatically expand when you add new rows, and they aren't automatically created when you add new columns. And they don't remain in groups, e.g. you can't make a reference like Namedrange1:Namedrange3, but in a table you can do Column1:Column3. Named ranges exist in a global namespace; column references exist in a per-table namespace. The table syntax makes columnwise operations clearer to express in formulae. Let's say you want to refer to the cell in the same row as the current cell, but in a different column: how do you do that if everything is just a named range? You need to do some kind of juggling with indexing and lookups, or else fall back to alphabet soup A1/R1C1 style referencing, because a named range is only good if you want to do an operation on every cell in the range. But that's often not what you want! In tables it's as simple as [@[other column]].

You would know this if you actually read the documentation or watched the video I posted. Or I could just repeat myself again (maybe I will write a macro to automate such tedium).

>Similarly, if you think there is something that "Power Query" can do that SQL cannot, then please show that.

Grab data from a csv file, a JSON file, a SQL database, and an Excel sheet, and combine them all together using a normie-friendly GUI.

Your question doesn't even make sense, it's like a type error. SQL and PowerQuery are not competing technologies, they're complementary.

>You could even write a quick macro in that generates the named ranges from column headers with one keystroke, it would be really trivial.

Yeah and you can also make Dropbox by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Spreadsheets are the only remaining programming system that people not inducted into the Programming Cult use.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#269

Post by taviso »

_dain_ wrote: post #268
taviso wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to come up with a task that cannot be accomplished, remember you said "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", but so far I've seen no examples. I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you? You can replicate the exact example you gave with named ranges. If there is something it can do that named ranges can't, then please use that example instead. Similarly, if you think there is…

>I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you? No, named ranges don't automatically expand when you add new rows, and they aren't automatically created when you add new columns. And they don't remain in groups, e.g. you can't make a reference like Namedrange1:Namedrange3, but in a table you can do Column1:Column3. Named ranges exist in a global namespace; column references exist in a per-table…

I'm happy that you like this syntax, but the claim you made was "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", not "excel syntax is more fucking beautiful".

I appreciate your advice, but I don't need to watch a video on R1C1 syntax, I literally maintain a spreadsheet :)

It seems like your real claim is that you really like the way Excel does it, nobody can argue with that.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#270

Post by jsemrau »

leobg wrote: post #250
jsemrau wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in financial services and have build prototypes with Excel that are now multi-million dollar revenue providers (implemented properly). Excel is powerful in this respect because it is a shared experience. Build something with SAS/R/Python, explaining the results is possible but getting buy-in from other teams is harder.

I’d really like to hear more about this. Is there a way I can contact you?

I have a SUS profile.
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