Queries. Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.
did you mean SQL? You can connect to a .xls via ODBC
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
151–160 of 201 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#152Automatic versioning and version control.
Microsoft Word has a versioning feature, under the File menu, not automatic though.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 fr…
Could the "clever protocol" simply be: refresh the numbers when the user refreshes a page?
The issue with this is that Excel refreshes the active workbook by default after every change. Any quant or someone dealing with huge sheets of formulas learn that you can change this behavior to default to refresh via shift+F9 (I think)
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Excel: The world's most popular functional programming language.
After searching for a decent reverse polish calculator for the iPhone for months, I finally realized that a spreadsheet app fits the bill there as well.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#155FWIW, I would often query a database and make completely de-normalized datasets that I'd paste into Excel. Then I would pivot the crap out of them and figure out how I wanted to slice the data...
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#156The ability to do regex matches to cells, not just full exact text with a case sensitive/insensitive option.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do. When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the…
In revision control systems, the "Who changed this line last and when?" is called "blame", so in fact, you are looking for "blame". :)
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#158Please do pivot tables
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's actually simpler than naming a range because you can use the names of the rows and columns that you have in the header of the table. It's a moot point since you don't have a Mac but from what you describe, Numbers does what you're missing. I saw in one of your later comments that you were also talking about multiple tables on the same page. Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page. So, in…
Tables as independent objects on the page does sound like what I'm getting at. Of course I'd need to see it to see if they're doing it the way I want ^__^
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#160I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google
The thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns, specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings, instead of through websites like Gurufocus.
For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman:
http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman
You can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC Info:
http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt
Clearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely available SEC filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...) into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than I'd like.