181–190 of 238 posts
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What would be nice though is if you could export logic from excel to examine it and port it. One can dream
Diffs in source control would be sweet
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There is no recursion involved in parsing. You keep a stack for the tree.
Recursive descent uses the processor stack as the parsing stack.
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I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former. So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?
I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.
I’ve noticed over the years that younger generations are far more used to using Google Sheets since schools and universities have strong adoption of Google Workspace. As a result, I’ve seen less and less use cases that were once believed to be Excel only domains turn out not to be.
I’m not going to proclaim the death of Excel by any means but it’s not as ironclad of a leader position as it once was. There is however some increasingly niche cases where Excel can do things that Sheets can’t, or doesn’t do as well. One non obvious (for todays environment) use case being offline portability, Excel being a standalone program really helps here.
That said, they both suffer from one issue that’s the same, which is there is no ergonomic way to run business logic rules over the calculations easily (and some cases at all)
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Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever. Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc. Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the…
I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former. So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?
I’ve worked with a “prototype CRM” that was just a big Google Sheet. Basically a lead generation form would add a row to the sheet, and the sales team would edit cells to reflect the state of the sale. It grew to 3 million rows and still worked. Doing that in Excel is a laughable idea.
I’ve also been on a management team where compensation planning was done with ten managers editing a shared Excel sheet with just a few hundred rows. Somehow some rows got deleted and others got slightly scrambled during the process. It was a huge mess.
cool project, but I don't particularly like "The democratization of spreadsheets" as a catchphrase. Like, what does that even mean? If by "democratization" you mean like, more able to be used, well anyone can go download LibreOffice or for the web use CryptPad's Spreadsheets, and if you mean that it's more open, well both of those are open source. Is this project specifically run democratically or something? It just…
I think it's the general idea that free (as in speech) software is "democratic". Even if the project does not do what you want you can always modify or fork, i.e. make changes privately for your own use or even distribute them. Closed source software is like totalitarianism, the leader or leading party knows what is best for you. Democracy is not the best analogy, free software projects have BDFLs. The difference is…
Calling it democratic is is like calling cancer a completely natural phenomenon. It's true, but it's also completely beside the point
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I would very much use a product that would work exactly like Google spreadsheets, web and all, but would be self-hosted.
Have you tried collabora office and/or onlyoffice ? These could match your need.
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What does that actually mean, "works"? I don't know how that behaves in Google sheets or Excel. Is it evaluated exactly once the first time the formula is entered? Every time you focus the input? Is the dice rerolled when a1 or a2 is modified? What?
Hi 8n4vidtmkvmk, the algorithms for evaluating spreadsheets are surprisingly tricky mainly because of the dependencies. The dependencies are only know at runtime and in Excel are lazy evaluated. So things like `IF(condition, value1, value2)` would evaluate first the condition if it is true it will evaluate value1 but not value2. So things that in other programming languages are a circular dependency are not so in Exc…
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I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former. So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?
I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.
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I think I understand the cult part of Excel. And to be honest, Excel is a fantastic tool. I don't think IronCalc can ever replace Excel (a boy can dream though!). But many companies need a spreadsheet of sorts they can embed in their product. Allow me a bit of humour: > Any sufficiently complicated startup or young company contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of 10% of Excel. Mayb…
as a saas founder, I can confirm you are 100% correct about this and we'll be looking at IronCalc for https://www.definite.app/
I was an excel enthusiast and studied accounting mainly for Excel. Although I have moved to programming unlike most I still do think Excel is awesome. I sincerely commend the enthusiasm, but working in the industry as the "excel expert", I think most outsider does not understand the "cult" aspect of Excel. Excel works. That is it. Trying to replace excel with anything will be percieved as replacing a calculator with…
I proposed the CRUD solution to complement their use case but the solution was not received well. They couldn't allocate computer resources to host the solution within their infra easily. So they pushed back and asked us to develop some Excel add-on, PowerBI based dashboard or some kind of Microsoft no code I can't care enough to remember the name.
I had no experience with PowerBI at all. But had a lot of fun learning about it. Great ideas on that piece of software but ultimately it's too hard for Excel users and too finicky for real data processing other than very simple stuff.
It failed spectacularly in the end. We could never make it work reliably and the customer also skimped on the license and didn't want to add some extra features M$ft charges on the side such as power automate and some "advanced instances". Which meant the software runs have to be manually triggered on the managers machine to update the dashboards. It was nasty.
The end result is completely unmaintainable. A collection of "M" scripts inside a power bi dashboard, it pulled data from multiple spreadsheets from specific locations, joined and processed the data, and generated reports. The scripts runs on a Thinkpad so it needs to fit inside the machine constraints of memory and processing. Some of the files are manually updated so very easy to mess up the format or permissions to the point the whole thing broke.
It was a cool experience I'm never repeating