51–57 of 57 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, Excel fails miserably at implementing the easy parts of a database. Seriously, how much does doing a simple "Select Distinct" suck in Excel?
So much that I wrote this: http://scpike.com/uniqify/ (I know you can do filter => unique only => copy somewhere) but it's stupidly slow.
I honestly admire the thought and effort that went into it. I fear that JavaScript's use of floating point as its single numeric type is likely to create surprising results for the unwary. I have come to the suspicion that the longevity of Excel's dominance is in part due to a sophisticated system for inferring numeric types.
Many people would be fine to use other spreadsheet software but why bother going through the bother of researching and downloading and learning that software when your company probably has Excel licences and you've got some entry level training that used Excel?
That dominance has other effects. There is a huge amoun of support (training courses; books; Usenet groups and forums; Magazine articles; other people in the office; etc) for Excel that don't translate immediately to Excel. There are very many third party tools to help you do stuff in Excel if you really need it to. And Excel is probably some people's first introduction to programming. (Which is perhaps a bit scary.)
I speak as someone who loves gnumeric and LibreOffice btw.
I honestly admire the thought and effort that went into it. I fear that JavaScript's use of floating point as its single numeric type is likely to create surprising results for the unwary. I have come to the suspicion that the longevity of Excel's dominance is in part due to a sophisticated system for inferring numeric types.
Excel is dominant because it runs on Windows and is supplied with MS Office. Many people would be fine to use other spreadsheet software but why bother going through the bother of researching and downloading and learning that software when your company probably has Excel licences and you've got some entry level training that used Excel? That dominance has other effects. There is a huge amoun of support (training cour…
Very cool! Slightly related... I reckon a command line / ncurses version of Excel would be really useful. Am I crazy? e.g. something like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Lotus-123-3.0-... Spreadsheets are a pretty useful and powerful tool when it comes to doing ad-hoc data analysis, but it's kind of annoying to get data in and out of them from command line tools.
Very cool! Slightly related... I reckon a command line / ncurses version of Excel would be really useful. Am I crazy? e.g. something like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Lotus-123-3.0-... Spreadsheets are a pretty useful and powerful tool when it comes to doing ad-hoc data analysis, but it's kind of annoying to get data in and out of them from command line tools.
Very cool! Slightly related... I reckon a command line / ncurses version of Excel would be really useful. Am I crazy? e.g. something like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Lotus-123-3.0-... Spreadsheets are a pretty useful and powerful tool when it comes to doing ad-hoc data analysis, but it's kind of annoying to get data in and out of them from command line tools.
GNU Oleo has a curses mode.
I would love a maintained {n,}curses mode spreadsheet that can handle excel1040.com.
Very cool! Slightly related... I reckon a command line / ncurses version of Excel would be really useful. Am I crazy? e.g. something like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Lotus-123-3.0-... Spreadsheets are a pretty useful and powerful tool when it comes to doing ad-hoc data analysis, but it's kind of annoying to get data in and out of them from command line tools.
Fat-finger errors are already terrifying in spreadsheets. How would you help prevent them in command line tools?