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Seeing like a spreadsheet

davidoks.blog

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Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#21

Post by somat »

whatever1 wrote: post #8
designerarvid wrote: post #4

Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people? Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.

They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.

We suck at excel because we recognize that it has a bad data model and avoid it. So when we want to calculate something we pick something with better structure. something more pleasant to use than the spreadsheets "it's a big bag of cells" approach.

Really, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now that I have better tools I don't enjoy doing work in them anymore.

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#22

Post by leoc »

designerarvid wrote: post #4

Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people? Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.

There is even a successful competitive scene: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/06/experie... https://excel-esports.com/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xw9w976jo

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#23

Post by dzonga »

whatever1 wrote: post #10

Excel (e spreadsheets) is the best quantitative planning piece of software. There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can answer “what if I changed that” as seamlessly as excel. Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.

can Numbers by Apple ever catch up ??

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#24

Post by dajas »

> And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet.

who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.

i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#25

Post by andyferris »

somat wrote: post #21
whatever1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.

We suck at excel because we recognize that it has a bad data model and avoid it. So when we want to calculate something we pick something with better structure. something more pleasant to use than the spreadsheets "it's a big bag of cells" approach. Really, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now tha…

I feel it's the extreme of "static vs dynamic languages". In Excel, even variables (cells) are dynamic, not fixed names in a lexical scope.

The reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically.

I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#26

Post by JSR_FDED »

This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.

Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#27

Post by JSR_FDED »

d0ks wrote: post #7

I wrote this, hope people enjoy it!

Thanks I enjoyed it a lot.

I’ve been thinking about how AI will change the way companies are organized. It’s hard to believe that today’s corporation is the ultimate organizational form, there’s just too much stupidity on display.

How will companies compete in the future when they’re all just an AI wrapper?

Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet

#30

Post by xboxnolifes »

pphysch wrote: post #15
thomascountz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of what you mean by "planning?"

Budget planning, presumably. How much you are going to spend and on what, and what you need to charge for your products to break even or meet a profit goal.

It doesn't have to be financial. It's anything that can be quantified.

Some random sheets I've used, neither made by me nor about business:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m08haqvTiXKIh4c7y4uM...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo_-HebVr_9PruE94LgT...

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