151–160 of 223 posts
I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg ( https://www.ultorg.com/ ) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen. UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update. The result is essentially a general purp…
When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn’t even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a “new paradigm” spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which was going to blow away everything that existed before it. For various strange reasons, Improv was first available on the NeXT, which certainly didn’t help its sales, but a lot of smart people believed that Improv would be to NeXT as VisiCalc was to the Apple II: it would be the killer app that made people go out and buy all new hardware just to run one program.
Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history. Search for it on the web, and the only links you’ll find are from very over-organized storeroom managers who have, for some reason, made a web site with an inventory of all the stuff they have collecting dust.
Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright chore, if not impossible.”
— Joel Spolsky, The Process of Designing a Product, 2009-05-09 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of-des...>
Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted without validation. [Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse of original hypothesis.]( https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-t…
Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB l…
Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow.
I don't think you can improve Excel too much, but you could the ecosystem around it: Microsoft should integrate a package manager. Not something public, but something companies can privately maintain and publish packages to, that would contain common functions for their specific business. If I could have a way to download a macro to a spreadsheet that would automate database connection for certain data sets, that wou…
It is great for freestyle. But people want to use it for more...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB l…
100% I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just... UGH. Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation. There HAS to be a unfilled niche here. nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I…
We had an Access database that managed grant funding for an entire public University and in many ways it worked a lot better than the SaaS app that recently replaced it. Need to collect a new set of data? No problem, give me 4 hours and it'll be ready to use :P.
I'd love to have something like Access but that worked very well as a platform-agnostic web app and could easily integrate with cloud infrastructure.
Jupyter has notebook/markdown - it has very hacky arguable support for desktop and reactive.
Observable is notebook/markdown and reactive, but not desktop.
Numbers.app is desktop and reactive, and the multiple tables per sheet is kinda notebooky, but is missing markdown.
in the metaverse, you will have 3d tables, x,y and z axis, you would be able to twist and turn those 3d tables to get different views, join with other 3d tables
If you think of it in terms of energy, where energy is defined as some quantity you want to minimise, then it becomes apparent.
Define the energy as the distance of an atom of data to other atoms of the same subject (row) plus the distance of the data to other atoms of the same abstract property (column). Then choose a model; this defines your atoms. You could call the selection of the model a discretisation because all models become 1s and 0s eventually. If you choose a model where atoms occupy pixels exclusively (only 1 atom per pixel) and the XY coordinates of each atom is the variable, I think you’ll find that feeding it into most optimisers (such as a Monte Carlo simulation) will result in something very closely resembling a grid of cells.
If you choose a different 2D model/discretisation, such as hexagons, you’ll find an abstractly similar result if not a little unfamiliar.
If you chose a higher dimension space for your model/discretisation (3D+), then you may find something uniquely interesting, but good luck mapping it to a solution which is compatible with our traditional 2D UIs.
I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg ( https://www.ultorg.com/ ) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen. UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update. The result is essentially a general purp…
That's how AirTable is described as well. And Google Tables. And Amazon Honeycode.