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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#191

Post by akho »

catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

No, it wouldn’t. Case in point: Excel has ability to spread a calculation over multiple lines, but the bugs are not down.

In fact, people who are aware of Alt-enter produce buggier code: they end up writing longer formulas, with fewer intermediate results displayed, and have less visibility of the functioning of their spreadsheets.

Write simpler formulas.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#192

Post by tomnipotent »

beefield wrote: post #184
max46 wrote: post #143

I think I big mistake people make here is that they think they are far better at everything on a computer than a non-programmer. They don't realize how much you can do in Excel and how much they suck at it. If you can't use it without a mouse and/or if you don't know pivot tables, you are just as much of a beginner as a C++ programmer who doesn't know what a pointer is. It's only after trying to convert an excel shee…

Opposing anecdote: I have converted excel spreadsheets built over years to SQL, and typically it did not take weeks to do that. ( Any organization that has a smallest reason to care about their data should remove save button from excel and start educating their personnel. Using excel in any important role should be seen as making the eventual mistakes on purpose and someone should be kept responsible.)

> and typically it did not take weeks to do that.

You're not seeing the process and effort that went into it, which can be considerable.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#193

Post by segfaultbuserr »

zoomastigophore wrote: post #189
Andy_G11 wrote: post #174

'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'. Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of…

I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.

Microsoft Access?

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#194

Post by beefield »

tomnipotent wrote: post #192
beefield wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposing anecdote: I have converted excel spreadsheets built over years to SQL, and typically it did not take weeks to do that. ( Any organization that has a smallest reason to care about their data should remove save button from excel and start educating their personnel. Using excel in any important role should be seen as making the eventual mistakes on purpose and someone should be kept responsible.)

> and typically it did not take weeks to do that. You're not seeing the process and effort that went into it, which can be considerable.

I think you misread my comment. Some of the excel sheets were a result of considerable effort. Years of different people working on them. Converting those to SQL was not a tremendously large effort. That was made by me, so I kind of know the effort:)

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#195

Post by otherme123 »

zoomastigophore wrote: post #189
Andy_G11 wrote: post #174

'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'. Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of…

I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.

Sadly databases are hard because data is hard. I've seen people trying to stuff one-to-many relationships in a single Excel tab duplicating the one side as many times as needed, e.g.

  Author_A Book_1
  Author_A Book_2
  Author_A Book_3
  Author_B Book_4
  Author_B Book_5
Another strategy I've seen is to stuff the many-side into a single cell, splitted with some less used symbol like |, ; or : . I'm curious to find what would they do when they meet a many-to-many relationship.

Horrors surfaced when we analyzed the data: unintended duplications because ids and uniqueness checking was not a thing, shifted columns, undocumented column "formats"... In the end we parsed the whole mess into a DB.

I don't see how you could implement a frontend for a database simpler than Access. It was as easy as Excel, with relationships. But reasoning a schema is harder than stuffing all things in a 2D table, and querying a multitable is harder than filtering a few columns.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#196

Post by Andy_G11 »

zoomastigophore wrote: post #189
Andy_G11 wrote: post #174

'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'. Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of…

I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.

MS Access can be directly linked to a spreadsheet for upload / download, or you can copy and paste data directly or import data files. Other databases (MySQL) also allow for import of CSV data.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#197

Post by thefr0g »

CJefferson wrote: post #46
asdff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code. Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption t…

People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other. My mother self-learnt excel, first as a to-do list, then a money tracker, then she learned some simple equations to keep track of weekly spending. How in R would someone do that? With a nice graphical view? I agree Excel has many many issues, but people use it because, in my ex…

> People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other.

At least in germany children are often forced to learn excel in school because the official curriculum includes "office software" which is an euphemism for "microsoft product training". This has certainly not developed from necessity. Even someone who thinks school should only be a preperation for the job market would agree that employees who are able to help themselves are better than ones who know how to use a specific version of Excel.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#198

Post by jsmith99 »

tomnipotent wrote: post #188
dgudkov wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spreadsheets give not-super-technical users a way to program data transformations in what I would argue is the most generally intuitive way that exists I don't think spreadsheets are a good way to program data transformations at all. Data transformations are inherently a pipeline/function abstraction, and even non-technical users understand that. Spreadsheets don't offer a good way to decompose a data transformation…

> good way But it is an accessible way. Your average Excel user can perform any number of useful transformations with simple formulas, and then throw that into a pivot table for useful aggregations (which is also a transformation). > tables are an afterthought to spreadsheets Excel power users have been solving this with VLOOKUPs for decades. > therefore even trivial joins are always a pain in Excel Trivial to a trai…

Lookups in excel are fine, at least now we have XLOOKUP but there's something depressing about an excel model which contains multiple massive grids of lookups. I find such things are much easier in a real join, where you can get your data into long format then write a single line of code to manipulate meaningful named columns.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#199

Post by mavhc »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #193
zoomastigophore wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.

Microsoft Access?

What we really wish for is a modern replacement for MS Access

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#200

Post by mavhc »

thefr0g wrote: post #197
CJefferson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other. My mother self-learnt excel, first as a to-do list, then a money tracker, then she learned some simple equations to keep track of weekly spending. How in R would someone do that? With a nice graphical view? I agree Excel has many many issues, but people use it because, in my ex…

> People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other. At least in germany children are often forced to learn excel in school because the official curriculum includes "office software" which is an euphemism for "microsoft product training". This has certainly not developed from necessity. Even someone who thinks school should onl…

I'd rather everyone was taught Excel than a very minor set of people learn spreadsheets by themselves. Barely anyone uses spreadsheets in UK it seems
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