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Spreadsheets are all you need

spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai

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Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#101

Post by tombert »

pqwEfkvjs wrote: post #94
tombert wrote: post #75

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and mai…

How do you deal with people who don't pay back in time or ever? What's your favourite tool for dealing with such situations?

Mentioned in a sibling reply, but the money I loan is to either close friends or family members or in-laws. I know them well enough to know that "not paying me back" really isn't on the table.

In regards to "not paying on time", these are friends and family, so it's not like I'm going to go break their kneecaps or anything; if they're a bit short on the payment date we just push it back.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#102

Post by tombert »

LtdJorge wrote: post #82
tombert wrote: post #75

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and mai…

I think you told your experience based on the "spreadsheets are all you need" title. I don't know if you know this, but it's a play on the "Attention Is All You Need" 2017 paper by Google which introduces transformers, the building block of LLMs.

That's what I get for not fully reading the article. Thanks for the reference, I have some reading material tonight.

Still, I meant everything I said about spreadsheets :)

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#103

Post by tombert »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #83
tombert wrote: post #75

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and mai…

Discernment is an earned virtue. Knowing when to build and when to borrow is akin to a great filter in builder culture, congrats on making it through

I do think that there's sometimes value in reinventing the wheel. Sometimes your goal is to figure out how a wheel works, or you think you have a better design for a wheel, etc.

In this case, I don't think anything I'd do is going to be revolutionary, and I don't think I would have learned at that much, so Google Sheets was great.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#104

Post by yreg »

mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

Our company used to run completely on Google spreadsheets (a lot of it was written by the CEO). It worked, but at some point, it became a convoluted unmaintainable mess.

First, we partially switched to Airtable, but soon abandoned it in favour of our own internal node/python tools. The company is now a lot larger and the tools are more robust/capable/clean now, but at the same time, they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#106

Post by tombert »

_fat_santa wrote: post #84
tombert wrote: post #75

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and mai…

Tangential but I've been thinking about building a real-estate calculator after my first homebuying experience, something that will provide you with a total cost of ownership, points bydowns and other useful metrics about a home purchase. Rather than jumping into a web app to start building, I've been prototyping it in Excel. I found it really cool for prototyping this type of app, I built my entire "MVP" in about an…

Yeah, at this point for a lot of the more "number heavy" things I do, my first version is generally in Google Sheets to get a rough prototype and to make sure my math is basically correct, and then a port to Julia.

The hyper-interactive nature of spreadsheets makes them kind of genuinely fun to tinker with. You can see results immediately, and you have enough logic (even in just the vanilla cells, not even counting JS or VBA) to implement a lot of algo stuff.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#107

Post by airstrike »

pipes wrote: post #35
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

- INDEX/MATCH. For all given purposes, the last parameter in MATCH() is always 0 unless you want to find the nearest match

- understanding that formulas can return arrays, not just single elements (easier in more recent versions of Excel which have made this more consistent for every formula), so you can e.g. AVERAGE(IF(A1:A100>100,A1:A100,FALSE)) get the average of the values between A1:A100 which are greater than 100. the FALSE parameter can be omitted there but I left it in for clarity. Interestingly this means AVERAGEIF() is just syntactic sugar, so I prefer to avoid it. it makes it easier to, say, change to MEDIAN(IF(...)) later, since MEDIANIF() doesn't exist

- if you combine the first two bullets above, you'll enter the fifth dimension

- don't ever hardcode a value if you can refer to it somewhere else. want to use INDEX(MATCH()) and AVERAGE to, say, take some average value over some time period? put the start and end dates into their own separate cells with no formulas, and then refer to those cells in your formula. if you later need to change the time period, you won't have to modify all your formulas, just those values

- LET() is strange at first but super powerful. most people still don't use it

- Separate data from presentation. This point can't be stressed enough. I care about it so much I'm literally building an Excel competitor to enforce this. If possible, separate raw data, data transformation and data presentation.

- most people know you can name cell ranges and refer to them in your formulas. most people don't know you can also name formulas and refer to them elsewhere. your "average value over time" calc doesn't even need to be in a cell anywhere, it can just exist as a defined value in a named range. now named ranges are hard to see (only visible if you open the name manager), harder to debug (you basically get just a #VALUE error most of the time, forcing you to copy-and-paste the named range into a cell to debug it) and they get copied to other workbooks when you copy-and-paste across workbooks, which makes them super messy.... but for short formulas they can be pretty nifty

- LAMBDA() is even more recent than LET() and basically makes named ranges more useful. even fewer people use it

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#108

Post by tombert »

LtdJorge wrote: post #85
tombert wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker who had the idea of having a system that automatically compiling xlsx files to Apache Spark, so that you could have the easy interface of Excel while having the processing power of Spark to crunch bigger data sets. He actually quit the company to build it; I should find out what came of that.

Well, there are spreadsheet backends using Apache Arrow for storage. You could use something like pola.rs or Arrow DataFusion + Arrow Ballista for distributed processing of the dataset.

Wait really? Which spreadsheets? I want to play with this!

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#109

Post by c-linkage »

brnt wrote: post #53
snehesht wrote: post #10

Spreadsheet link https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/rele...

I'm not a big Excel user, but I see errors that I get when I type in English function names while using a non-English version of Excel. Is it correct that functions (and thus this xlsb file) are not portable to other language versions of Excel?

It's been my experience that Excel spreadsheets are not transferable from one locale to another. Maybe there is a "culture-invariant" version of a spreadsheet but I haven't found it.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#110

Post by skipants »

mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

I'm confused... are you just commenting on the name of the website itself or the content?

The content itself is about demonstrating how an LLM/Neural net works using a spreadsheet and is a play on the title "Attention is All You Need". It has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet for most of your use cases.

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