81–90 of 141 posts
My #2 wish is a way for it to automatically break down and indent nested function calls for readability. The color coded brackets help, but only a little.
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This is because businesspeople like to fiddle with formulas, graphs, and filters untill they isolate (i.e. cherry-pick) the subset of data that [makes them look good | supports their agendas]. They don't want canned reports. Excel makes this easy because they already know how to do those things in Excel.
People get really mad when you call this p-hacking, btw. I used to try and make this point to ”analysts” that I worked with, that science involves coming up with a hypothesis and then looking at the data. The response I got often enough that I’m sure it’s being taught somewhere was that you “need to let the data tell it’s own story”. Turns out lots of people have decided what the conclusion is and are taking that con…
AWS is pushing this message on every NFL broadcast with their Next Gen Stats ads. "The data tells us all"
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Yep, we have a expensive reporting tool, can too all kinds of things, query every type of database we have... Number one function used. Export to Excel, and normally it is on reports of basic table join queries, none of the advanced things it can do with the data
This is because businesspeople like to fiddle with formulas, graphs, and filters untill they isolate (i.e. cherry-pick) the subset of data that [makes them look good | supports their agendas]. They don't want canned reports. Excel makes this easy because they already know how to do those things in Excel.
My #1 wish for Excel is named aliases in a formula so that I don't end up with repetitive incomprehensible formulas that are impossible to follow because I'm using the same VLOOKUP in three different places for a calculation. My #2 wish is a way for it to automatically break down and indent nested function calls for readability. The color coded brackets help, but only a little.
It's pretty impressive, especially since my impression is that it's mostly one person's hobby project.
[0] http://ellx.io
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is because businesspeople like to fiddle with formulas, graphs, and filters untill they isolate (i.e. cherry-pick) the subset of data that [makes them look good | supports their agendas]. They don't want canned reports. Excel makes this easy because they already know how to do those things in Excel.
Excel also makes it easier to experiment. Pandas requires you to change an entire column which can frequently be processor-intensive, take forever, and be hard to understand. With Excel, you can just take a random cell, try something out, and if it comes up with nonsense, undo it
As noted, Google Sheets introduced this over a year ago [1]. But this is exactly what competition is about -- I love seeing this come to Excel precisely as an answer to Google's version. You have to wonder if Microsoft would have tried it otherwise, since Excel is so entrenched there's less profit motivation for innovating. Sometimes it feels like "office" software hasn't changed much since the 90's, but when you loo…
Recently I started building Excel addons with custom formulas (e.g. =company.inventory(upc, WAREHOUSE), which call an api. This has blown the minds of non-tech folks among my clients. They equate this to magic. I was forced into doing this because after a year of digging to find out what reporting they wanted in the dashboard (“oh a thousand things… where’s the Excel spreadsheet export button?”), I gave up and now de…
Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.
It got a little too big and I rewrote it as a C# desktop application talking to a SQL Server, but it was impressive what this person was able to create with no real programming knowledge and just Microsoft Access.
Quick shout out to Ellx[0] (I presume, Excel pronounced backwards), which I discovered on HN a couple of years ago when discussing where I'd like to see spreadsheets evolve. It's basically functional reactive spreadsheets in JavaScript, with a storage format that's friendly toward code review, source control, diffs, etc. It automatically performs function lifting, so functions over single values become time-varying f…
Example: https://ellx.io/ellx-hub/lib