Automatic versioning and version control.
Dropbox?
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
51–60 of 201 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#52Oh 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…
Numbers, from the iWork suite, does this. You can name your rows and columns and just them in your formulas:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/
Of course, it's not perfect if you look at the proprietary format, at the smaller number of formulas than Excel, and so on. But it's a nice piece of software as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#53Perhaps, one could gather up some good ideas from Ken Tiltons 'cells' system for Common Lisp?
My understanding of Cells what that it is a dataflow system that handles calculation graphs for some kind of formula. I doubt that it has any insight into user workflows in an actual spreadsheet application.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#54SQL queries would be really good. I have been in many situations where I would like to do a simple query on a large spreadsheet and can't so I have to resort to programming. Most of the time it is not worth the effort, so I don't bother. This feature would be a big help.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#55Queries. 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…
BTW, you might be able to throw =large() around that formula to get your top 10 directly
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?" Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.
You can diff two versions against each other. Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?
That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#57Excel doesn't work well on very large spreadsheets (I use it on some sheets with over 150,000 rows.) Things are slow to load, and commands like lookups are extremely slow, enough that I think they're doing O(n) lookups for things like the VLOOKUP command, even when looking up data on tables or sorted columns.
What makes the above even worse is that Excel has a pretty poor understanding of when a change necessitates a re-calculation of all values in the workbook, so I grind to a halt when making random unrelated changes (and even if I switch it to manual calculations, it re-calculates upon saving, meaning saving my work can become a 30-40 minute endeavor).
Pivot tables are pretty clunky an unintuitive for most users, even though I think lots of people would use them if they understood what they were.
VBA is a very verbose and inelegant language, and there are lots of operations which are called in totally different ways than the analagous forumulas in the spreadsheet. There are even some things you can do in spreadsheets which don't have an analagous VBA command, which leads to the fantastic work-around of using cells on your worksheet instead of variables and changing their text values to the command you really want to just run in VBA.
The standard fill down operation sometimes doesn't Just Work(TM). Example: say you want to make a cell "=C2E5". You try filling down and you get "=C3E6", when you wanted "=C3E5", because E5 is a constant. OK, fair enough, you say, you can't reasonably expect the machine to infer what you meant. But now you adjust the cell below to what you want, and now you select two cells, one that's "=C2E5", one right below it that is now "=C3E5", and now with both selected, you fill down again. Presto, the next cells are "=C4E7","=C5E7","=C6E9","=C7E9","=C8E11".... etc. That's pretty bad.
Some of these are pretty mundane, but they would all be big deals for me.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#58"... In the long term, it is unlikely that any particular ASP will survive without you needing to migrate your data to something else. ... The issue you bring up, of how do you deal with the fact that it is unlikely most ASPs will be around to maintain your data, is a good one. It should be discussed and careful attention should be paid to it. Your suggestion to go with ones that have the most partners and customers (VisiCalc's situation in its day) doesn't fit with your comparison to staying away from VisiCalc. ..."
From the man (Dan Bricklin) himself ~ http://www.bricklin.com/nextvisicalc.htm
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#59Some thoughts:
-With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there.
-Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, and maybe even restricting access within worksheets within the document.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Doesn't help. The point is Excel doesn't know what range I want when I extend my table, not whether I can give the range a name or not.
Am I missing something, or wouldn't =sum(C:C) work?