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Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

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Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#131

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

vanviegen wrote: post #126
merouan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, for clean data. You can’t clean data without looking at it (a lot), though.

If you have data that's so 'dirty' that you can't decide on the filtering rules in advance (or based on only historic data), then what you have is garbage, not data. Therefore, we could call the art of shaping this into meaningful stories garbage science .

Tell me in a comment you have never worked with business data in your life.

Business data is full of minor inconsistencies which are not obvious until you sit in front of it. Products are sold by different units. Reporting ranges and aggregates are slightly different. Subsidiaries use categories which are close but not exactly identical.

There is generally plenty of massaging to do before you can get the information you need.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#132

Post by twobitshifter »

dmaevsky wrote: post #118
twobitshifter wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like something I’d really like, but when I went looking at the demos and docs it was spitting lots of errors on Safari Example: https://ellx.io/ellx-hub/lib

Creator or Ellx here. The reason is quite prosaic: I haven't maintained the site for almost a year :/ For various reasons. However, I'm getting back at it now. Ellx as a framework has evolved during this period, and is capable of much more than just a spreadsheet now, but this progress hasn't made it to ellx.io just yet. May I ask what you liked most about Ellx? What is your use case?

My use case is a tool that produces living documents mixing writing with charts, data, and tabular results that can be delivered to nontechnical clients and updated and modified by staff with excel knowledge.

I’ve found various JS notebooks like starboard and observable JS to be the closest thing, but they’re really not there. PowerBI is a Microsoft solution but it’s dashboard focused.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#133

Post by spockz »

EMM_386 wrote: post #89
spockz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was hired a couple decades ago to replace a Microsoft Access system that was written by a non-software engineer and was running an entire company with around 50 users with all sorts of complex forms. 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.

This is exactly what I meant. For real world situations and when you don’t have SWE “to do a proper” job you can get very far fast with just access. Especially if you hook it up to a running db instead of using the internal one.

Which gains did you or the users get when rewriting to C#? What were the downsides?

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #61
SoftTalker wrote: post #58

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#135

Post by marniewebb »

SoftTalker wrote: post #58
phpisthebest wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As one of those business people, I find I’m not very good at requesting reports. There is a gap between what I think is interesting and what actually is interesting. I use spreadsheets (and sometimes visualization tools) to help bridge the gap and make a better on going request to our reporting team.

Often, this is learning for me. I have a bunch of Stephen Few’s books and use exported CSV files to figure out which reports are useful to me and my org. When I find them, I do make a request for standardized reporting. These often become the basis for regular review meetings. In those meetings, we still come up with instances where we need to export to CSV and get into the data to understand what we are looking at.

Our work is going through a big shift this year that means our historic data is not helpful in predicting trends. That’s increased the need for this kind of engagement with the underlying data.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#136

Post by IIsi50MHz »

layer8 wrote: post #97
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And [Home] without jumping to select column A, and the arrow keys should work consistently instead of sometimes moving the cursor and sometimes inserting a cell selection.

Arrow keys: That’s actually consistent, F2 toggles the two modes (Enter and Edit), and the current mode is indicated in the status bar. See for example https://www.omnisecu.com/excel/worksheet/excel-cell-modes-re... . It’s a bit like Vim modes.

> That's actually consistent,

Not consistent with any program I know onWindows, Linux, macOS, or even ye olde Macintosh System Software, unless you count spreadsheet programs that are trying to be more like Excel.

Not even consistent inside Excel, because there are many edit fields that default to "evil mode" (my personal feeling about "insert cell references when arrows keys are pressed, and disable Undo", while some default to "normal text editing mode", and some cannot be placed in "evil mode".

I'd like a visual indicator on or adjacent to the text box, and setting to force it to default to one mode or the other.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#137

Post by IIsi50MHz »

Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #110

Gods of Microsoft, please (PLEASE!) add Python as Excel scripting language

PyXLL, openpyxl, xlwings ?

I think last time I looked (~3 years ago) PyXLL seemed most advanced, useuful, integrated, least buggy, but requires subscription after 30 days.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#138

Post by phonon »

wombatpm wrote: post #117
Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #110

Gods of Microsoft, please (PLEASE!) add Python as Excel scripting language

While I would love that, I much prefer a gut compatible diff for excel files. I’m so tired of files like budget-final-v2-final-final-approved.xlsx

https://www.xltrail.com/integrations

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#140

Post by EMM_386 »

spockz wrote: post #133
EMM_386 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hired a couple decades ago to replace a Microsoft Access system that was written by a non-software engineer and was running an entire company with around 50 users with all sorts of complex forms. 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.

This is exactly what I meant. For real world situations and when you don’t have SWE “to do a proper” job you can get very far fast with just access. Especially if you hook it up to a running db instead of using the internal one. Which gains did you or the users get when rewriting to C#? What were the downsides?

> Which gains did you or the users get when rewriting to C#? What were the downsides?

The gains were performance. The MS Access application was not backed by a proper database, I forget the exact setup but it was more of just a shared MDB file over the network? Whatever Access was capable of at the time. There were contention/locking issues and all the other sorts of problems you'd expect given the setup. My memory of it is a bit hazy, but I know it was lacking a true database outside of its own MDB format.

Funny story, after the rewrite the software was so succesful internally that we decided to start selling it, and it became one of the industry leaders. The person who wrote it originally was highly knowledgable in their field, and I happened to have decent enough programming knowledge. The two put together ended up with something special.

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