31–40 of 77 posts
I want the same, I want it so much that I have been working on gasp gui code to do such, an activity I have found I am profoundly bad at. But the theory is, I love the relational database, they are a sort of rigorous superset of the spreadsheet, and I have replaced all my spreadsheets with database tables, however while it is very hard to beat sql for rich comprehensive data transforms and analysis, ad-hoc data entry…
What about MS Access. I used to use it years ago. It was amazing how simple it was to create and deploy an application based on relational data.
I want the same, I want it so much that I have been working on gasp gui code to do such, an activity I have found I am profoundly bad at. But the theory is, I love the relational database, they are a sort of rigorous superset of the spreadsheet, and I have replaced all my spreadsheets with database tables, however while it is very hard to beat sql for rich comprehensive data transforms and analysis, ad-hoc data entry…
I don't want to be dismissive, this is nice work and it's clean and lightweight. But it might be good to look at existing solutions in this area - pandas was developed within the financial industry to solve exactly this sort of issue. If you need more topological flexibility there is xarray, and if you need spreadsheet type immediacy it's worth looking into Mito.
Rustaceans should look into pola.rs: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars
[Laughs in pandas] I don't want to be dismissive, this is nice work and it's clean and lightweight. But it might be good to look at existing solutions in this area - pandas was developed within the financial industry to solve exactly this sort of issue. If you need more topological flexibility there is xarray, and if you need spreadsheet type immediacy it's worth looking into Mito. Rustaceans should look into pola.rs…
Or, just use a relational database.
Alternatively, airtable and similar are basically relational databases that have some really neat features that let you create relationships by just copying/pasting data, or importing CSVs. They're limited in a lot of ways, but it solves a certain set of problems that can't be solved with code or excel.
I want the same, I want it so much that I have been working on gasp gui code to do such, an activity I have found I am profoundly bad at. But the theory is, I love the relational database, they are a sort of rigorous superset of the spreadsheet, and I have replaced all my spreadsheets with database tables, however while it is very hard to beat sql for rich comprehensive data transforms and analysis, ad-hoc data entry…
Microsoft Access is this. It was quite popular in its heyday, but as time wore on, it turned out that people eventually either want scalable, real, full-blown databases, or infinitely flexible spreadsheets. Anything built with a product in that grey area in between will eventually want to go one way or the other.
Excel has get and transform that makes this easy + an odbc provider (you can query excel as an sql database). A reminder for everyone excel web is actually entirely free and you can create stuff with https://excel.new We spent a lot of time making it faster and rewrote a bunch of it ^^ (I'm just an engineer, I don't speak for my corporate overlords)
> Spreadsheets are one of the hardest things you can build — right up there with compilers.
I think I would like to see a "democratization" of the technology and find books, and lectures about it as popular as we find books and lectures about compilers.
As for the OP I find their take interesting, of course you can accomplish that with more established tools but it was a refreshing read and an interesting, if not inspiring, notation.
PS: Is it possible that there is a regression when computing sheets with lots of open ranges (like =SUM(D:D))
[Laughs in pandas] I don't want to be dismissive, this is nice work and it's clean and lightweight. But it might be good to look at existing solutions in this area - pandas was developed within the financial industry to solve exactly this sort of issue. If you need more topological flexibility there is xarray, and if you need spreadsheet type immediacy it's worth looking into Mito. Rustaceans should look into pola.rs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're asking for a GUI for simple CRUD on an arbitrary table, I think that's pretty common. What database are you using, and what API are you using to access it? (Edit: and on what O/S?) If one of the obstacles to data entry is normalization, perhaps an updatable view if your database supports it.
> I think that's pretty common. Not as common as you might think. It is a hard thing to search for, and the ones I have been able to find all suck. I wrote a PHP application a long time that allowed you to create a GUI for an 'arbitrary' SQL database table, using an XML schema to configure the appearance, validation etc. of the fields. Life got in the way, and I stopped development before it was ready for prime time.…
I want the same, I want it so much that I have been working on gasp gui code to do such, an activity I have found I am profoundly bad at. But the theory is, I love the relational database, they are a sort of rigorous superset of the spreadsheet, and I have replaced all my spreadsheets with database tables, however while it is very hard to beat sql for rich comprehensive data transforms and analysis, ad-hoc data entry…