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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?

#31

Post by CatDancer »

Oh my goodness, you're going to get my spreadsheet rant. This is what frustrates me every single time I use Excel (or the Google Docs spreadsheet, for that matter).

I may not be answering your question since I'm talking about usability instead of more powerful features, but I can't but imagine that there'd be a market for simple and easy to use, even if it turns out it's not going to be addressed by your particular startup...

I have a table, some data that I've laid out in rows and columns. Something simple. How much money I've been paid on my invoices to clients, for example, one invoice per row.

Then I want to sum the column, to get how much I've been paid in total. (Yes, I'm talking about a very simple spreadsheet. But that's my point, that something so simple is still messed up!) So I type in a formula: =sum(C2:C10)

Now I add a row, to put in another entry. Does my sum change, to include the new row? (C2:C11) No, it does not.

So I do not want to be saying sum(C2:C10). I want to say, here is my simple table, and give me the sum of this column. Which, I don't know what the language would look like, but if I named my table "invoices" maybe it would be sum(invoices.C) or sum(invoices.amount) or something.

Every time someone comes out with a new spreadsheet (Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs...) I look to see if it is easier to use. Nope! Everyone is too busy being compatible with the last guy.

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

#32

Post by gruseom »

timmorgan wrote: post #13
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?

No one. But people often have that much data - e.g. from mechanical sources - that they need to analyze or report on.

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

#33

Post by DenisM »

LogicHoleFlaw wrote: post #24

I'm exactly the opposite of your target audience with this question, but hopefully I can give a useful response anyway :) I know almost nothing about Excel and it's a deficiency I feel quite keenly. The program is almost completely undiscoverable to me and I don't even know where to start with it. I know that there are powerful uses and features of Excel but the model (or at least the bits of it I've been exposed to)…

Did you try Excel 2007 yet? They dedicated entire release trying to make it easier for people to get started with Excel (all of Office, really) and then discover more features as they go along.

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

#34

Post by smanek »

An 'inner join' would be nice.

A few years ago I worked at a large financial consulting firm, and I was amazed at how often accountants would implement what basically amounted to an 'inner join' using nested iteration over columns in vba.

This was a few versions of Excel ago, so I don't know if this feature is available in recent versions or not. I imagine not, since then Excel would really start to encroach on Access's domain.

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

#35

Post by joe_the_user »

asimjalis wrote: post #15

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 t…

"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."

Yes. This feature implemented well would create a really cool app. What would be even more interesting would a situation where several different sheets could pull data from each using a clever protocol to avoid the churning of values. Imagine different enterprises which each had online sheets describing their current production abilities and current supply needs. With a clever protocol, their production processes be semi-automatically coordinated (and remember, semi-automatic, some throttling is necessary to prevent self-referential cells from feeding back in an unhelpful way).

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

#36

Post by lallysingh »

timmorgan wrote: post #13
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?

I have a lot of tools put out CSV for me. It'd be nice if Excel could handle a few thousand lines when I have a few gigs of RAM.

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

#37

Post by newt0311 »

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…

"more than ~1 million rows."

Grow up and use an actual database.

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

#38

Post by lallysingh »

One thing nice about Numbers is that you don't worry about cells as an absolute coordinate system. Each table's unique, and you can add/remove rows without hitting everything else.

So, in a word, encapsulation.

Also, the line between databases & spreadsheets is fairly thin, how about some relational calculus? Some import/export with SQL? Or a query language?

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

#39

Post by ctkrohn »

boucher wrote: post #21

I think something that google has begun to do, and that is incredibly valuable, is data "sources" that aren't hard coded into any particular spreadsheet, but that come from a URL or API of some kind. I should be able to make a row of "oil prices by month since 2005" that updates on its own. Or a cell with "current value of the DOW".

There are plenty of third-party plugins that do this -- Bloomberg and Reuters have them, for example. For example, the formula for the current level of the Dow Jones Industrial average is =blp("INDU Index","LAST_PX"). The equivalent Reuters formula is something like =RtGet(".INDU","PXLAST"). At work I have a sheet which pulls in real-time prices on Treasury bonds, interest rate swaps, options, stocks, futures, mortgage-backed securities, etc. and organizes them all into nice tables and charts. It's built on the Bloomberg and Reuters APIs.

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

#40

Post by ctkrohn »

CatDancer wrote: post #31

Oh my goodness, you're going to get my spreadsheet rant. This is what frustrates me every single time I use Excel (or the Google Docs spreadsheet, for that matter). I may not be answering your question since I'm talking about usability instead of more powerful features, but I can't but imagine that there'd be a market for simple and easy to use, even if it turns out it's not going to be addressed by your particular s…

Excel allows you to do named ranges. Select a range, then type its name in the address box. Then, in another cell, you can type =sum(myrange).
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