161–170 of 378 posts
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> Sharing Excel sheets is extremely easy - you just mail them Unless the other computer is set to a different locale and your data contains formatted numbers and dates. Then everything breaks.
Are you sure? I'm pretty sure Excel doesn't store numbers or dates in localized format.
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I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.
While I haven't encountered localized names, localized formats make Excel an absolute pain for me. My language uses the "European" number format of a comma for decimals and periods for thousands separators. Excel tries to adjust to that by using semicolons for argument separators (i.e. ADD(1.5, 3.5) -> ADD(1,5; 3,5)). The problem is that their locale detection is wildly inconsistent and there isn't a good way to over…
I don't care (I just use LibreOffice Calc, which accepts any delimited values file just fine, and just asks which separator to assume), but it means that when you develop an option for users to download some statistical data as comma-separated values file (which is easy to generate), that you now have a problem if that user wants to open it in Excel (which makes sense for CSV) and that user is using one of Excel's broken locales (e.g., Dutch) where comma-separated values are not understood (again, it wants semicolons in Dutch).
I.e., the expected file format changes because of the locale Excel uses! So where someone in the US can just double click the CSV file (not to mention anyone using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc anywhere in the world), someone using Excel in the Netherlands will just get a spreadsheet where every line consists of that whole line of values stuffed into column A.
That said, like any other tools, spreadsheets has it's perks and it's drawbacks. It's important to consider these drawbacks, when considering spreadsheets.
The people at Stencila have a very good take on this: https://stenci.la/blog/introducing-sheets/
My issue with spreadsheets is that they could be improved a lot with minimal changes, not nobody seems to do it in popular office packages. Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works. Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fac…
In my opinion - "No Code" tools will fix this gap to build real world apps yet being as simple as excel. While airtable is just a DB as a service, a real no code tool would have ideally all the basic building blocks: a. DB as a service (like Airtable) b. BPM capability -> to add workflows to the data c. Ui Building to abstract data d. API integration (may not advanced learning for power users)
Ms Access actually has a fairly decent way to build apps without really touching code, but it requires understanding relational databases enough to use it properly. Most (non technical) people end up using excel as a database instead.
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I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.
Even worse, the token used to separate arguments is localized. So you may have to use semicolons instead of commas. But in some places you need to pass a string representation of a formula and there Excel will only understand the non-localized commas. Fun all around!
Problem was the original version was written in their Danish office, and whoever wrote it had handed it to the Norwegian office exported as text before he left, and they'd imported it and started munging it and adding lots of stuff before someone bothered to try running it and realized it was completely broken. I wish I'd dug more into how they'd managed to get themselves into a situation where they'd significantly modified the code before trying to run it even once...
Version control? What is version control?
So they had this broken version that had some Danish keywords with a bunch of Norwegian updates, that they didn't want to just re-import into a Danish version and copy over properly in a tokenized form and having to try to identify and re-apply the Norwegian updates. So I got the fun job of properly translating it and figuring out what the new code was meant to do and make it do it in the process, with no access to any of the people who had worked on it.
[it is worth pointing out that this was an office for several hundred staff of a major international company that developed large scale information systems for things like police departments; while version control wasn't everywhere in the mid 90's, a large systems integrator certainly ought to be using it... Particularly amusing that it was their ISO 9001 documentation that was being handled in such a haphazard manner; happy to have never been a customer of theirs, though]
The task was extra "fun" for certain values of fun, because unlike, say, English vs Norwegian, or English vs Danish, Danish and Norwegian are close enough that 80% of the time a term from the Danish version might look right and be valid Norwegian, but the odds seemed to be (and maybe my memory is exaggerating it due to my lasting memory of extended pain) about 50/50 that the Norwegian translator of Word BASIC had chosen a different function name to the Danish translator for no good reason. Or there were slight, hard to spot, spelling differences. And sometimes what looked like a mistake was a function defined locally.
I spent a couple of weeks reading through the whole thing and mostly rewriting code that could have been written from scratch in a couple of days if they'd just told me what the end result was meant to be instead of dumping a pile of non-functioning code on me. But I guess I was cheap compared to their regular staff back then.
It was how I learned Word BASIC (I'd taken the contract, figuring it'd be easy to pick up, so I told the recruiter that sure I knew it, on the basis that I certainly knew a couple of variants of BASIC). Never to use it again (at it was replaced by a Visual Basic variant a few years later anyway)
I would hate spreadsheets a lot less if they were testable. Or didn’t “help” by silent type conversions that skew analyses (which you’ll never notice because, uh, no tests) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pa...
What in spreadsheets is not testable? It's trivial to write a test that opens the spreadsheet in excel and tests any formula calculations via Excel Automation API.
how many people ever even try?
I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations. So many critical infrastructures, billions of dollars in planning, and just systems are built out of Excel. It's amazing. You'd assume something that services millions of people a day would have some more sophisticated and customized solution, but you're w…
I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.
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On the same hardware, with the same table, Excel in Windows 7 does a cross-tab faster than MySQL in Ubuntu does. Indeed, MySQL chokes if there are more than a few hundred columns, but Excel just keeps going. And it uses all CPU cores. Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I did that, I wanted a simple visualization of ping-location results for thousands of IPv4 from several hundred ping-probe locations. So that meant…
Meanwhile open any document in Photoshop with a few layers and effects and the computer grinds to a halt, no matter the specs, no matter the year, through the ages. New hardware comes out? Booya, new Photoshop XYZ -> let's put your fancy hardware on its knees, begging for air.
Hasn't been my experience ever. Photoshop is one of the speediest image manipulation programs out there...
I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations. So many critical infrastructures, billions of dollars in planning, and just systems are built out of Excel. It's amazing. You'd assume something that services millions of people a day would have some more sophisticated and customized solution, but you're w…
But how do you handle sharing? The main issue with Excel, and its main downfall, is the sharing of data and versioning, with person X has an older version of person Y by a few hours and needs an email of person X to keep doing her job.
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while paying a monthly fee...
The monthly fee for Photoshop is around 1/100th of the old retail price. That works out at about 8 years of use before you have to 'buy' the software again. Seems fair to me. And for those who don't like paying for Photoshop - which, given it's an astonishingly powerful piece of software, probably means "people who don't actually need Photoshop" - there's always cheap or free alternatives that provide about half the…
That's because you only think of yourself. Creatives are one of the most struggling professions, and can have widely different returns per year, and salaries in different parts of the world can be much lower.
People who could afford to buy Photoshop at some point (perhaps even a used copy), later down the road might not be able to pay the subscription for a few months, but in the new scheme they lose access to the program altogether.
8 years? There are creatives that use 10 and 20 year old versions of Photoshop on Windows.