I love the way you've presented the underlying structure so much, I found myself wishing you would replace the spreadsheet itself!
Well, maybe one day...
Please do this. I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.
Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#42Very cool! I've got two bloated excel spreadsheets that need to be ported to a web app and this looks like it would be really helpful. Is this available yet to use or still in the early stages?
Yeah it's still quite early stage.
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#43I do financial modelling at a Big4 and can easily see the value of this type of visualization tool. I wonder if/how you are able to visualize INDEX/MATCH type lookups, SUMPRODUCT and array formulas? Obviously, these types of formulas are not in every model, but for my usecase it would be pretty important. Also, since others have asked but the answer watn't too clear: is any data uploaded? You mention that you have pl…
-A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row.
-None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded.
-We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#44We would certainly use this at our company...In the real estate finance world we exclusively use Excel for financial underwriting, and at times, cells and formulas get lost in the fray. As the analyst around here, I know how to audit a spreadsheet just looking at the formula (if I built it...), but the guys in the field using our models have no clue how cell A links to cell B. I vote for online solution, as us corpor…
Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#45We would certainly use this at our company...In the real estate finance world we exclusively use Excel for financial underwriting, and at times, cells and formulas get lost in the fray. As the analyst around here, I know how to audit a spreadsheet just looking at the formula (if I built it...), but the guys in the field using our models have no clue how cell A links to cell B. I vote for online solution, as us corpor…
Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?
I don't personally, but I could imagine our company might. That being said, we use Box and other "insecure" places to upload files. I argue that as long as you have a policy in place that what is uploaded isn't shared without permissions given, I'm sure we wouldn't have problem uploading.
Thinking about it more though, keeping it integrated into excel or offline has its merits. We have 20mb+ financial models that would take forever for your software to churn through.
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
hmm, what's wrong with uploading it? I would actually prefer the no-Addin solution: the Excel Addin 'deployment' is a bit messy (with references stuck in the Addin-manager) + no Addins in the Mac world (though I guess that >95% of Excel users are on windows)
We were definitely pursuing the add-on route. Although add-ons can be clunky we felt people would want to switch between the two views quickly and often. For example, if you make a change in the spreadsheet view you might want to see what effect that had on the tree. What do you think?
Dual-view, in two windows.
Also, uploading would make it an instant non-starter for me, due to data sensitivity issues.
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#47Oh good. An autoplaying YouTube video with audio.
closes tab
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#48I do financial modelling at a Big4 and can easily see the value of this type of visualization tool. I wonder if/how you are able to visualize INDEX/MATCH type lookups, SUMPRODUCT and array formulas? Obviously, these types of formulas are not in every model, but for my usecase it would be pretty important. Also, since others have asked but the answer watn't too clear: is any data uploaded? You mention that you have pl…
-A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row. -None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded. -We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.
We have some pretty powerful in-hourse tools for visualizing information flow within a given worksheet. It will overlay borders around contiguous blocks of identical (R1C1) formulas and color code based on whether the cell has a value, a formula an off-sheet formula and cross-file formula, etc...
However, where our tools fail, and where your tool really shines is transforming the spreadsheet visual paradigm into something that more closely resembles the intent of the model. Very cool! (I signed up)
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#49I love the way you've presented the underlying structure so much, I found myself wishing you would replace the spreadsheet itself!
Well, maybe one day...
You are just a small step away from the concepts in Subtext:
I highly recommend watching the screencasts, especially the demo:
http://www.subtext-lang.org/demo1.html
I have wanted a graphical interface for functional programming in environments like Excel for a long time. In my experience, most of the pseudo-programming that has dominated software engineering (object-oriented/MVC/message-based, patterns, best practices) goes away when you can model something directly.
Nobody has been able to successfully apply proven engineering concepts from, say, electrical engineering or VLSI to software engineering. I think it's because the leap from imperative code is too long.
But nobody has successfully made functional code approachable either, because too often it's contaminated by syntactic sugar that's too symbolic, various handcuffs that make even the simplest tasks arduous (poor handling of global state), or learning curves that can't be scaled when it comes to interacting with real-world time-based data (monads etc).
For the most part Excel has none of these issues. You can stick an imperative macro in the middle of your functional code and it works just fine, as it should in any other functional language (as long as you follow certain rules like, no globals). Then you can write another macro to load CSV data into your spreadsheet, or even spit it out to a folder that has a shell script watching it to transform the data again. I think it's more productive to work in that unix-like manner (of a bunch of small tools that do one thing well, pipelined together), than it would be to try to integrate notions like dynamic data into Excel. But the achilles heal of Excel was always obfuscation.
We need to get away from language when we're thinking about functional programming, and focus more on data and transformations. Slate looks like a great start, kudos!
Re: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#50WARNING: CONTAINS AUTOPLAY SOUND.