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Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
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Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#2In my experience working in some "speadsheet heavy" businesses:
- complecting 'data' and 'presentation of data' together
- lack of tools to help with 'correctness'
- lack of version control
- horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.
- spreadsheets full of pivots and charts rapidly become the 'truth' of a business, but without any checks and balances to ensure that what they show is actually true, leading to confusion and great badness.
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#3The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they are often used in lieu of more appropriate tools because of poorly considered IT policies and organizational practices which leave no other tools available to users and fail to provide adequate support for users on some tasks for which programming is required and other tools are more suitable.
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#4The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they are often used in lieu of more appropriate tools because of poorly considered IT policies and organizational practices which leave no other tools available to users and fail to provide adequate support for users on some tasks for which programming is required and other tools are more suitable.
Actually, I think this is the biggest strength of spreadsheets, that no one has taken advantage of yet. Most of what you term as poor IT policies is just what (in my personal experience) just users finding something that works for them. And software developers don't seem to take note of this.
You are right that there are lots of better tools for tasks users use excel for, but 2 which spring to mind for me that devs haven't paid attention to are form/table design and databases:
Form design: It used to (ok, still does) drive me crazy when I see excel used to make flyers and forms to be printed out. But for the users what could be easier than drawing a box on the screen, adding a line weight, and then drawing other boxes inside that using the convenient spreadsheet grid? Why hasn't someone designed an app that works that simply?
Databases in excel are another monstrosity, but for a lot of users, all they want is a simple lay of listing things which they can then sort, and maybe sum a few totals on. Firing up a complete RDBMS is over kill for this use case.
So I see the biggest problem with spreadsheets as why aren't we learning from the way people use them and putting this into action?
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#5In my experience working in some "speadsheet heavy" businesses: - complecting 'data' and 'presentation of data' together - lack of tools to help with 'correctness' - lack of version control - horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about. - spreadsheets full of pivots and charts rapidly become the 'truth' of a business, but without any checks and balances to ensure that wha…
I would add a couple of things:
I'd like asserts / rules / invariants / constrains that alert me when they are no longer valid. Everyone implements this with conditional formatting to get them red.
Related, I don't like having three coding spaces: the cell value, the format formula, and possibly vba.
Also, the whole book/sheet/cell hierarchy is very limited. Complex formatting is complicated when a simple fix would do: just let me compose views of several sheets, so I can put tables side-by-side without the need for them to be aligned, break when I add columns to one table, etc. Support for tree-like structures is done typically by merging parent cells to span more. Just support trees as an alternative to tables! If the layout on point 3 would exist, this would be beautiful. A structure would be book/object-set-layout/cell, where objects can be: a tree, a table, etc. Formatting is part of an object and can be more easily templated, code is referenced, not created, in the objects, and is all apart - vba style. ResolverOne had this last one right. Having all code apart would mean easier version control, and easier separation of logic/presentation/data. Lastly, you could link objects from separate locations and authorization, and have a federated data model. But now I'm just overarchitecting :).
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#6The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they are often used in lieu of more appropriate tools because of poorly considered IT policies and organizational practices which leave no other tools available to users and fail to provide adequate support for users on some tasks for which programming is required and other tools are more suitable.
Actually, I think this is the biggest strength of spreadsheets, that no one has taken advantage of yet. Most of what you term as poor IT policies is just what (in my personal experience) just users finding something that works for them. And software developers don't seem to take note of this. You are right that there are lots of better tools for tasks users use excel for, but 2 which spring to mind for me that devs h…
There are tools that do that, even more simply than Excel does. That's a separate issue, e.g., app discovery, corporate approval in some cases, and people unwilling to use the best tool for the job.
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#7There needs to be an easier way to transition from spreadsheets to an application. A spreadsheet that was based on programming principles rather than business principles would be fantastic.
Also, a spreadsheet that was much more scriptable for someone who didn't want to learn VB.NET would be a dream, as a programmer.
Disclaimer: I don't generally pay for software out of my own pocket.
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#8In my experience working in some "speadsheet heavy" businesses: - complecting 'data' and 'presentation of data' together - lack of tools to help with 'correctness' - lack of version control - horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about. - spreadsheets full of pivots and charts rapidly become the 'truth' of a business, but without any checks and balances to ensure that wha…
> horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.
I don't remember where I read this, but I heard that the basic Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is written with office workers in mind first. That is, Word isn't written for authors, Excel isn't written for database managers/big data specialists, and PowerPoint isn't written for motivational speakers.
I think the idea of the basic Office Suite is that a user could grasp the basic functionality of the software without having to undergo any training. Second to that, tools and other functionality for those with specific needs (e.g. pseudo-database functionality, basic data visualization in Excel) could use the software where the project was small enough. Excel was given great programming features without a proper programming language to support it.
This isn't to say that these programs are not feature packed or bad. They're kitchen sinks that want to make everyone happy.
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#9There needs to be an easier way to transition from spreadsheets to an application. A spreadsheet that was based on programming principles rather than business principles would be fantastic. Also, a spreadsheet that was much more scriptable for someone who didn't want to learn VB.NET would be a dream, as a programmer. Disclaimer: I don't generally pay for software out of my own pocket.
Do you mean transition from specific spreadsheets you would already have for that task? Or in a wider sense, e.g. as a company - gradually transition from using spreadsheets to using applications for some of the tasks?
Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest problems with spreadsheets?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I think this is the biggest strength of spreadsheets, that no one has taken advantage of yet. Most of what you term as poor IT policies is just what (in my personal experience) just users finding something that works for them. And software developers don't seem to take note of this. You are right that there are lots of better tools for tasks users use excel for, but 2 which spring to mind for me that devs h…
There are tools that do that, even more simply than Excel does. That's a separate issue, e.g., app discovery, corporate approval in some cases, and people unwilling to use the best tool for the job.
Or maybe those tools lack some features and that's why people decide to improvise with spreadsheets?