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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?

#81

Post by aaw »

I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:

1. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a (name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it.

2. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame" feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily.

3. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out a tree of formulas would be an improvement.

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

#82

Post by kirubakaran »

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…

1. Already doable to a significant extent http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+python

2. Well, Google does this :)

3. Follows from 1.

4. Good idea, but why not just use this: http://www.google.com/search?q=spreadsheet+widget

Or http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55244&#3...

5. Already easily doable in Excel http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6115870.h...

In Google Spreadsheet, just use: =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price")

------

And I hope Google is working on a REPL for Google Docs where you can interactively run any language on your spreadsheet. :-)

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

#83

Post by ph0rque »

notauser wrote: post #19
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…

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

Slightly offtopic, but I just wanted to point out that excel syntax looks a lot like lisp, with biggest different being the first item is outside the parens.

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

#84

Post by nailer »

cabalamat wrote: post #61
rms wrote: post #2

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

> Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways. Then why not build database-like functionality into the system?

I'd like to be able to open a database as as spreadsheet, with fields turned into column names, and tables on worksheets.

I'd like v and hlookups to be turned into SQL (and vice versa) with animations explaining what's happening in each.

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

#85

Post by carterschonwald »

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…

what about being able to specify linear algebraic manipulations of part of the spread sheets, that would go a long way to make many things easier (sort of a mini matlab, but done right)

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

CatDancer wrote: post #66
Timothee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have a Mac so I don't have a way to tell if iWork does what I want or not, but note that simply being able to name a range doesn't do it.

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by c1sc0 »

Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and 'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be accessed by us computational types.

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

#88

Post by pasbesoin »

diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae, cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting recognition of intracell text formatting.

Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then the data format and API's will be less... obtuse.

Interactive, visual interface to same diff functionality.

When I last looked, for Excel there was a product or two going partway in this direction; however, most seemed rather limited, e.g. export the cell contents to text and diff that.

Useful for number crunchers. Also useful for all the people who end up using something like Excel as a glorified table. In the business world, there are endless use cases of people managing documents, requirements, results, etc. in Excel. Providing such a "BeyondCompare" fucntionality for this content would be very useful to a lot of them, (Caution: You might also have to teach them how to use it, including the diff concept. And that could be a very significant bump to try to get over.)

Since Excel is so dominant, that class of people might not be your target market. Nonetheless, I see a good diff type utility as being a real plus.

I also can agree with Zain's comment regarding versioning support.

And, integrated regexp support. I wedged same in to Excel/VBA by defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (back in 1999 or 2000). Very useful. A lot of problems people deal with in spreadsheets can be greatly aided by decent pattern matching and substitution.

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

#90

Post by lunchbox »

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…

(1) can be done with Visual Studio Tools for Office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Office
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