I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get GoogleChartsAPI url".
That'd be sweet.
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
161–170 of 201 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#162Oh 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…
I see I wasn't very clear about the point of my rant... I apologize to everyone who has taken the time to thoughtfully offer me solutions of how to get Excel to do this, but I know about that. I should have explained that I know about getting Excel to extend a range when I insert a row using techniques such as having the range include a blank row at the bottom, and I'm not surprised to hear that Excel has a feature like "list builder" bolted on.
When I said, "I'm frustrated every single time I use a spreadsheet", it's not that I can't do whatever it is that I need to get done, I just get annoyed when products are made hard to use when they don't have to be. It's not so much a personal frustration as that I've spent a lot of time at non-profits helping non-computer people use computers, and it's a huge waste of their time and of my time to have to train them how to manipulate the software to get what they want instead of the software just doing it.
C2:C11 was a tremendous advance in 1979 when personal computers had 48K of memory and 40x25 character screens, but goodness gracious, it's thirty years later!
Making something easier to use is a tremendous amount of hard work, but it isn't conceptually all that hard to understand: you look at what people are doing, and you write software to implement that, instead of making them manipulate the software to do the implementation themselves.
I haven't looked at it myself so I don't know if Apple got it right or not, but from Timothee's comment that "Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page", it sounds like they're at least trying.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#163Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#164Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#165Excel's core functionality is great, but many of its extended functions are hard to use and/or limited. In addition to adding functionality, you could revamp some of the functions that excel currently doesn't do well. My list would be:
1. Multi-user experience - Better workbook sharing and editing.
2. Better scripting (already mentioned above)
3. More than 65536 rows!
4. Queries/Lookups - It may be that I'm not proficient enough, but it seems like VLOOKUP and pivot tables can be done A LOT better.
FYI our old company was considering buying a product to extend excel functionality. Probably a possible competitor. Check it out: http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/xcelsius/
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
O RLY?
To make my point explicit: Excel being Turing-complete does not imply it being feature-complete.
I know. It was a joke, thus the ":P", and so was the "O RLY?". But maybe the emoticon wasn't clear enough and I should've added an interrobang there? Anyway, thanks for the -10 karma points.
BTW, I do my spreadsheets with a Von Neumann derivate of a finite state automaton.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#167Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#168Oh 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…
I see I wasn't very clear about the point of my rant... I apologize to everyone who has taken the time to thoughtfully offer me solutions of how to get Excel to do this, but I know about that. I should have explained that I know about getting Excel to extend a range when I insert a row using techniques such as having the range include a blank row at the bottom, and I'm not surprised to hear that Excel has a feature l…
I think your rant is somewhat misplaced as inferring the user desire in this case is not always possible. In general, I find it to be dangerous behavior when merely adding data changes formulas. I think the proper action is to insert a row.
On the other hand, having defined tables with in a workbook is great idea, but it makes the whole application a wee bit more complicated. I'd like to see it in something of a hybrid between Access and Excel, where you can mix structured and tabular data.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#169I think something that mixes structured and tabular data together would be great. If you had a worksheet style
"dynamically typed" structure that was supplemented by some structured tables of data that could be easily referenced and updated by Excel style formulas, it would be very useful. In this way the spreadsheet sits as a layer on top of several database tables that can be shared between users. I sort of imagine the ultra-flexible spreadsheet on one monitor and this floating collection of data tables on the other one. It's a hybrid.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#1701. create a Table and then have an option to create the corresponding mySQL. (Relation DB Design)
2. create a mySQL Dump from the Table Data.
3. Other cool MySQL Optimizations.