Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

The problem is users like the presentation of a spreadsheet. So far, there seems to have been no evidence of this changing.

My question is why do they like it? My assertion would be because it is visual in how they want it. They are usually less interested in the complicated "how do I get this value" than they are "I want a value to be here." That is, even if it is wrong, they are more interested in seeing the data laid out in a way they specify than they are coming up with a data flow analysis of what they did.

And, really, I'm not sure this is that surprising. Having a tool show you how all of the data is linked together certainly can make for a good understanding of how the data was calculated. May even help fix mistakes. However, the table of data view of the spreadsheet is ultimately what you want. Just with no mistakes.

Interesting stuff. Yeah whats great about excel is there is zero learning needed to get started. Anyone can start typing numbers in the cells then move on to more complex tasks. The problem is, although each step towards building a model in Excel is quite simple the end results can be very unwieldy.

It's a pet peeve ;-)

Good luck with the product though!

I'm not sure if anything will displace Excel (or spreadsheets in general).

But what I'd like to see is a generalization beyond columns/rows/sheets for relating data of various dimensions. The underlying data type would probably be a list (so lisp) but have options to enable order, array access, key->value access, etc. Cell references would work more like in programming languages and operate over ranges that aren't just two dimensional.

So a spreadsheet would be a subset of this. So a set of columns with array access, a set of rows with array access, a notation like column-row for cell references, and all of the operators like $ for absolute references, etc.

I guess the underlying data structure could be a relational database but I'd prefer something human-readable like JSON with a thin notation over it for expressing relationships between structure members. You could use something like the Subtext editor to work on it but maybe if the syntax was easy enough you could write it manually.

I think the real power of this would be if relationships could be executables (like how Excel macros work but with stdin/stdout/stderr and black box scripts written in any language). Imagine being able to call sed/awk or really high level tools like Go/Erlang and Matlab/Octave per-cell the way we use SUM in Excel..

An Excel to LabVIEW converter. ;-)

It seems like a really cool idea. For better or worse, Excel has emerged as the de facto "programming" tool for small scale computation and database tasks. It's an annoyance that you can't see your entire program at once, especially for checking correctness, finding bugs, and understanding someone else's work.