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Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

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Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

#13

Post by timmorgan »

aneesh wrote: post #3

Excel is actually a reasonably complete program. That said, I would like to be able to: 1. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel. 2. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit). 3. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet. 4. R…

1 million rows??? Who wants to scroll through that mess?

Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

#14

Post by DenisM »

andr wrote: post #6

65,000. (that's the maximum number of rows in Excel before 2007). I'd like something similar to SPSS, which is more convenient for tables with lots of rows and separates the data from the formulae. A tool for working with streaming data. Also, charting that works for large amounts data. Try having Excel chart 65,000 rows and you'll have time to make coffee while you wait. There are no ways to zoom or analyze Excel ch…

Take a look at SQL Server Reporting Services.

It's a charting and reporting tool over SQL Server (and I thinkg any other ODBC/OLEDB source), it works over large datasets, has both Web UI and desktop UI, and comes in the box with SQL Server itself.

FD: I work in SQL Server, athough not on Reporting Services. FWIW, Reporting is a huge success with our customers.

Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

#15

Post by asimjalis »

Here are some features that would be nice in Excel:

  1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?).
  2. Online spreadsheets like Google.
  3. Better search and replace.
  4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML.
     Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This
     should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the table pulled
     out of the spreadsheet.
  5. Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example,
     imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it
     was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically.

Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

#19

Post by notauser »

rms wrote: post #2

Queries. Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.

You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas, and a lot of the rest with pivot tables.

For example, getting the sum bill of every person who lives in England looks like this in one workbook I have:

{SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))}

(If I want to see, say, the top 10 outstanding bills in England I have to use a pivot table).

Excels biggest problem is that the workbooks produced with it are really hard to maintain. Looking at the code above, for example... going back to that (which is only a trivial example) in a month is going to be pure pain. Updating data requires cutting and pasting, which can be error prone. Unit testing is only possible with sample known-good data sets, and copying in new data tends to make it less than certain that the version you are using is the same as the one you tested.

Oh, and sharing workbooks between users is really tough. I can usually figure out other people's Java - but I have yet to be able to reverse engineer a non-trivial Excel work flow.

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