We need software that works both as a spreadsheet and as a database.
Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#12Dang, what software engineers hate spreadsheets? I've never worked anywhere that didn't use them for project planning and other such stuff.
Many times in my career, I've been tasked with re-creating the functionality of a spreadsheet into a web application. And inevitably, users complain about the change in form because it yields a major loss in features, in favor of a streamlined experience. It's a never-ending battle competing against excel.
But, I don't hate spreadsheets. I do hate trying to replace them with software .
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#13Dang, what software engineers hate spreadsheets? I've never worked anywhere that didn't use them for project planning and other such stuff.
The post is probably something of a straw man. I think the "hate" is mostly about spreadsheets being used as effectively hard to audit spaghetti code for for tasks that would be better coded in some Python or R.
I've probably never been a real spreadsheet power user (though I've had some pretty big ones). But they're hard to beat for any sort of semi-structured tracking.
I sometimes wonder if spreadsheets as we know them were sort of an inevitable outcome of personal computers. There were some alternative takes early on but they never took off. It's also sort of interesting to me that some other tools in the same general space like databases on PCs sort of withered away.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#14Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful tools, as they support reactive programming natively.
The main problem is when you embed a table in a sheet and use it as you would in a database. It is far too easy to overflow the maximum spreadsheet size, or overwrite data... or worst of all sort some but not all of the columns.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#15Spreadsheets versus programmers is a war that can be much more peaceful. In my work, I have found that, especially in data science, the spreadsheet user and the programmers are often trying to accomplish similar tasks, but the “language barrier” between them leads to much more fragmented workflows. I also think this article does a good job of identifying spreadsheets as a low-code programming language — spreadsheets…
Spreadsheet users are programmers. Shouldn't be a war.
But, the problem with spreadsheets is that they are an engine of shoddy programming. I don't think it's fundamental. All currently existing spreadsheet implementations hide their functions and make review difficult. If we had spreadsheets that somehow exposed the relations between the cells and made them easier to inspect, ideally minimizing selective interaction (obviously you can mouseover, but that is a far more selective interaction than scrolling a file), they would be less of a problem.
To some degree notebooks (matlab/mathematica/octave, jupyter, pluto, livebook) are solving this problem, and probably being "halfway-between" spreadsheets code, with being fully reviewable is a game-changer, why data scientists like them.
I think you could also improve on the spreadsheet in other ways by being more opinionated. You could have each table be a named entity not on an "infinite-plane of cells" (so you have to set the # of rows and columns, obviously should still be easy to insert/remove rows and columns). I am sure I am not alone in thinking for the last 3 decades that graphs just "hanging out in the middle of the cells" is really stupid.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#16I agree with a lot of the points raised here. I think many of the problems with spreadsheets are due to the software rather than the users. As mentioned in the article, its hard to slowly iterate from a small manageable spreadsheet to an larger software solution.
For example, Excel would be a lot more usable and maintainable for me if there was a way to make a special "data sheet" in which data types are forced to be consistent within columns and there was a concept of column names. Still GUI-based and user-friendly. That would encourage a logical seperation between data entry, data output, and computations. In my experience, the main challenge of helping users with spreadsheets is when they create spaghetti code that mixes data and computation together.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#17My issue with spreadsheets is that they don't encourage reproducible science. For example, if you write code in R or python to log transform your data, you can look at the code and see that it has been done. If you have a spreadsheet that you (or worse, someone else) has created, you can maybe look at the values and guess it has been log transformed, but you can't know for certain that was the case and no other transformations were applied.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#18I agree with this one. People who don't know how to code can easily use spreadsheets in your everyday life. For example, to calculate your income and expenses. To track and monitor your finances.
I wonder how many bankruptcies could be avoided if more people just had some basic spreadsheet literacy. Before I bought a house, I built a stupid simple model to understand what my monthly expenses would look like. What you get an appreciation for is that very quickly you can go from comfortable to precarious with just a few additional fixed expenses (childcare, a new car, a boat). Without laying it all out and seei…
Spreadsheets can be extremely powerful for what-if analyses. They can of course also be abused in that respect, especially in a business context, where complex spreadsheet models can get conflated with reality.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#19I have a love hate relationship with spreadsheets. While in University I was a bit of an Excel Monkey, I knew everything there was to know and I prided myself in not having to use my mouse to make complex models... Now that I worked at a major bank, learned to code and moved to the data science side I despise spreadsheets. Most people don't realize this but out entire banking system is built on a couple excel models that all the banks use - when something goes wrong its a nightmare to fix.
Recently, we've started to see a major shift away from spreadsheet models to spreadsheets being used as data dumps and then being uploaded into third party software. Usually this "software" tends to be nothing more than some SQL and python scripts behind a fancy UI. I would personally prefer the banks to continue using Excel sheets and then pay for their employees to learn basic python and SQL but that's too simple and the SaaS sales guys have their claws firmly embedded in the upper levels of most orgs.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#20If you have had to fill multiple, spreadsheet-based, customers' InfoSec questionnaire about your SaaS product, including the need for tailored, multi-paragraph answers (ie: you can't copy/paste from stock responses), you might disagree with the raw headline.