Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you email me about this? Address in profile.
Oh, sure, I'll probably even start a blog out of this :P
Watch out, you're blowing your cover as lazy :)
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
191–200 of 201 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#192Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#193Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hybr…
No, I don't want the spreadsheet to "infer" my desire or for it to change my formulas when I enter data.
The formula should describe the calculation I want performed and it should continue to work even when I enter new data. For example, if I have a "defined table" as you say, I should be able to ask it for a sum of a column in the table, and have it continue to work even if I add new data to the table, with hacks or trickery or invoking obscure commands.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#195I have to use old software databases at my engineering job. The only way to get the data out of the system is to show it on the screen 1 at a time or to print it out. I would love for this new spreadsheet to pretend to be a printer and have the data piped directly to my spreadsheet instead of my pdf printer.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#196Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559
Does R Commander fit your needs? http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
not even close. That was a quick slap-together for an undergrad class. And the look and feel is just painful. SPSS would be a better model.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#197Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#198I have to use old software databases at my engineering job. The only way to get the data out of the system is to show it on the screen 1 at a time or to print it out. I would love for this new spreadsheet to pretend to be a printer and have the data piped directly to my spreadsheet instead of my pdf printer.
Upvoted for the craziest bad-ass suggestion in the whole thread.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#199(1) Optional Fortress like "typing". It's almost always a mistake to add a number representing an amount of dollars to a number referring to feet. And feet can't be added to meters. Heck, it's typically wrong to add gigabytes to megabytes without a conversion (which depends on whether you're talking about disk space or ram).
(2) Many of the complaints mentioned come from the way that a given entity, "the sheet" (or page) is used to both computation and to present multiple computations. Rethinking that is likely to yield huge benefits.
(3) It should be possible to tag computations so they can be more easily used to build other computations. For example, I was recently doing some cost analysis and realized part way through that I'd like to break down the numbers in other ways. Since I was using a sequence of equations in an ordinary programming language, it was easy enough to define appropriate accumulators and pick up the values from the equations, but it would have been a pain with a spreadsheet. And, my solution was too granular.
I'm not expressing (3) very well, but I think that it's a big deal, so feel free to contact me.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this is just too interesting, and I should stop putting off this blog thing.
So? What have you learned?
It is possible, not specially hard, I implemented a Turing machine and a one-dimensional cellular automaton. You can program just about anything in a spreadsheet. I will later study the inner properties of the spreadsheet as a data structure and a programming paradigm.