Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Relational Spreadsheet

kevinlynagh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#71

Post by webdoodle »

emeril wrote: post #67
webdoodle wrote: post #62

At my previous job, one of the accountants asked me on my first week if I could solve a spreadsheet problem they had involving payroll for it's ~250 employee's. As a 20 year database developer, manager and analyst, I was really hesitant, but after she showed me the amount of time it was taking her to do this every 2 weeks, I sort of felt obliged. All of the data was from several flat files, it consisted of each emplo…

fwiw, one can import the contents of a list of excel files into one big excel file using some relatively vanilla vba without having to involve sql I personally usually only involve a database if there's some significant amount of data involved and/or if it's significantly more efficient than the above I don't get the hate on excel in this thread compared to rdbms's; i.e., just use a few vlookups for some joins which…

The import wasn't the hard part, as you say, pretty vanilla. It was the export back to Excel that was time consuming. It involved recursive cell references, some that referenced other worksheets and one that reference another Excel file altogether.

When I tried a direct export, the system would interpret the cell references as values instead of parts of a formula. I had to parse each formula using CHR(). It also got tricky when I wanted to format the cell, say for currency. The final VBA script was barely 100 lines...

I may have some of this wrong, as it's been almost 9 years now.

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#72

Post by switch007 »

arjvik wrote: post #41
switch007 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. That’s bad even for Microsoft. What is wrong with excel.office.com with a version toggle?

excel.new is a shortcut to creating a new spreadsheet, not a brand new version of Excel

excel.office.com/new then

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#74

Post by genman »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #24
somat wrote: post #2

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.

There were two problems with Access - it looked too complicated and it looked ugly.

It is still available even in the 365 package but I can't remember when I used it last time. It was long time ago.

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#75

Post by mediaman »

keybits wrote: post #65
Bloating wrote: post #8

Grist?

Grist is outstanding. Deserves much wider recognition as a 'better Airtable' for many use cases: https://www.getgrist.com/

Completely agreed - I've found it vastly more powerful than other tools, and handles 100k+ rows with speed, even loaded with Python code in each cell. I've been surprised how much I can get done with it, and its ability to display multiple tables on a single page for sequential filtering is powerful.

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#76

Post by gnum4n »

kgodey wrote: post #33
somat wrote: post #2

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…

We are building a open source UI for Postgres DBs that should meet your use case: https://mathesar.org . We're doing our first release next week!

The UI looks pretty neat, but the install instructions are essentially "curl {url}/install.sh | bash -", which is kind of icky and runs a bunch of sudo commands. Since you're using Docker anyway, why not provide human-readable instructions?

Or, alternately, separate the config process from the install process. I'd be much more comfortable running config commands from a script inside the docker container, or as a first-run setup UI, or as a simple .yaml config.

It does look like something I'd like to try out later, though. Either after the install process is cleaned up a bit, or once I have time to read through the whole install.sh script.

Edit: In case it matters, my personal preference is to install things as linux packages instead of Docker, but I understand that this is a stretch for early-access software.

Re: A Relational Spreadsheet

#77

Post by kgodey »

gnum4n wrote: post #76
kgodey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are building a open source UI for Postgres DBs that should meet your use case: https://mathesar.org . We're doing our first release next week!

The UI looks pretty neat, but the install instructions are essentially "curl {url}/install.sh | bash -", which is kind of icky and runs a bunch of sudo commands. Since you're using Docker anyway, why not provide human-readable instructions? Or, alternately, separate the config process from the install process. I'd be much more comfortable running config commands from a script inside the docker container, or as a firs…

This is all good to know, thank you for the feedback!

Our current installation process was spun out of our local development setup, which isn't ideal.

Cleaning up installation is one of the top things on our to do list. This also includes documentation for setting up Mathesar without Docker. We'd like to do Linux packages as soon as we can too.

Post reply on HN