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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#61

Post by ttul »

rexreed wrote: post #37

* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#62

Post by CJefferson »

asdff wrote: post #57
CJefferson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how do I edit, extend and quickly filter and search that CSV? I'd probably do it with Excel to be honest. Lots of data in business isn't generated by another program, it's built and maintained by users.

Python or R have tons of ways to edit, extend, and quickly filter and search within stuff like a CSV. You could even do all of that with a bash script. It will probably run a whole lot faster on your computer than opening the excel workbook.

I think we might be talking at cross purposes. How, in Python, do I extend a CSV with new numbers, or edit existing values? Use 'input'? I could implement an excel-like interface, but then I already have Excel.

I could just open it in a text editor I suppose, but then I have to deal with escaping, and moving around cells, and that sounds painful.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#63

Post by pfranz »

CJefferson wrote: post #48
asdff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have the script take in the data as input from somewhere else, maybe your organizations shared drive. could be a .csv or whatever format. could be a database like sqlite. Much better than some big hulking macro heavy excel workbook.

Then how do I edit, extend and quickly filter and search that CSV? I'd probably do it with Excel to be honest. Lots of data in business isn't generated by another program, it's built and maintained by users.

I think you raise a good point that often gets forgotten. When you switch from a general purpose tool to something specific, you lose visibility and introspection tools.

I see people move from a filesystem based workflow to a database and while that may be faster and more efficient you lose those tools to look at and tweak data. You either need to write those or teach them how to navigate the database. People rightfully hate black-boxes as soon as stuff stops working as expected.

Personally, I love the Linux command line and will pipe stuff in and out or stash things in flat files. I may move the data back into a spreadsheet to get more visibility or look for trends.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#64

Post by arthurcolle »

ttul wrote: post #61
rexreed wrote: post #37

* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

Large sheets? Google Sheets has a much lower cell and row limit compared to Excel

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#65

Post by dan-robertson »

ttul wrote: post #61
rexreed wrote: post #37

* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

Instead one only needs to worry that one can’t get one’s work done.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when they are impossible in gsheets. Indeed that app even struggles at the ‘easy’ task of being able to fiddle around with table formatting. Its sole advantage is the collaboration. It can be used as a place to dump small amounts of varied tabular data to share but not really for calculation or analysis.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#66

Post by arthurcolle »

narush wrote: post #20

Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…

I never thought I'd be someone to do this but 'mito' is slang for pathological liar in French, i.e. short for 'mythomane' haha, kind of funny for something that's supposed to be a persistent source of truth. Names don't matter at all, but just wanted to comment on this. Lol!

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#67

Post by CJefferson »

asdff wrote: post #50
spoonjim wrote: post #30

Excel has its flaws, as do spreadsheets in general, but the upside is that spreadsheets allow people to become programmers who never would grok programming in purely abstract terms. Spreadsheets allow the user to see each intermediate state in their application, as well as each iteration over the input data set, laid out in a 2-dimensional grid. There just isn't any substitute I've seen that is as accessible to the c…

I really don't think excel is accessible. I don't know how to do anything in it. If I had to make a plot I'd have to search for an article that would probably be about the same word length as the one I'd find searching "how to make a plot in python." Imo excel isn't easier for the lay person, it's just entrenched because you have people now in the workforce using excel since windows 95. It allows people to become pro…

In excel, I can make a plot by typing in my numbers, then clicking the 'plot' button. Excel shows a selection of plots of my data and lets me choose the one I like the most.

To do that in Python, I'd have to first choose a format to enter my numbers (I'd probably use Excel, then export CSV). Then I have to install Python, pip install a graphing library, import the CSV, then plot. I have to go through the different types of plots one by one.

I've taught python and graphing, you need much more than a 2 hour lesson before people can be left alone without help I'm afraid, if they have zero programming experience.

I don't claim Excel is good programming practice, or scalable, but it is much easier than Python or R. The best future thing (I think) would be an excel like interface which would show you, and let you edit, Python that did what you'd just chosen in the GUI.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#68

Post by gizmo686 »

vxNsr wrote: post #16
gcthomas wrote: post #4

Spreadsheets are a hammer so if that's all you know then all problems look like the nail. Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start, but there are many options better than Excel for critical systems.

Excel is more than just a hammer it’s the fork that is in every single drawer of every single company/org in the world. It’s not about every problem looking like a nail, it’s that, nobody had to pay for this fork, somehow everyone has it and it’s such a great fork that it can do 90% of the problems you throw at it. Yea sure some problems would be better solved with specialized tools, (eg knife, spoon, etc) but those…

> nobody had to pay for this fork

Actually, everyone had to pay for that fork. Excel is a paid product, and isn't even included in the cost of Windows. It is, however, bundled with MS Office, which includes Word, which is even more of a must have at almost every single company/org.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#69

Post by spoonjim »

asdff wrote: post #50
spoonjim wrote: post #30

Excel has its flaws, as do spreadsheets in general, but the upside is that spreadsheets allow people to become programmers who never would grok programming in purely abstract terms. Spreadsheets allow the user to see each intermediate state in their application, as well as each iteration over the input data set, laid out in a 2-dimensional grid. There just isn't any substitute I've seen that is as accessible to the c…

I really don't think excel is accessible. I don't know how to do anything in it. If I had to make a plot I'd have to search for an article that would probably be about the same word length as the one I'd find searching "how to make a plot in python." Imo excel isn't easier for the lay person, it's just entrenched because you have people now in the workforce using excel since windows 95. It allows people to become pro…

Because the layperson I'm talking about can't think in terms of abstractions, kind of like a math student who hasn't learned algebra yet. They can only verify the correctness of their algorithm by inspecting the intermediate values at every step, and scrolling down through the input set to inspect the corner cases. The problems with this approach are extremely obvious (which is why spreadsheets error out so often, or even worse, produce the wrong answer without any visible errors), but in many cases this is the only way for the people with the domain knowledge of what needs to be done to build an application to meet their need (they don't know how to code and they don't know how to write a functional spec).

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#70

Post by asdff »

CJefferson wrote: post #62
asdff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python or R have tons of ways to edit, extend, and quickly filter and search within stuff like a CSV. You could even do all of that with a bash script. It will probably run a whole lot faster on your computer than opening the excel workbook.

I think we might be talking at cross purposes. How, in Python, do I extend a CSV with new numbers, or edit existing values? Use 'input'? I could implement an excel-like interface, but then I already have Excel. I could just open it in a text editor I suppose, but then I have to deal with escaping, and moving around cells, and that sounds painful.

You would read in the csv, edit what you need or add/remove data, then write a new file or overwrite the old one. You don't need to implement any interface, there are tools that do all of this. You could probably write the code up for something simple like this in the time it takes for excel to open the file and you to make the change manually by finding the field, clicking away with the mouse, and typing it into the cell. Specifics beyond that can be searched for on the internet as there are a wide variety of methods you could tailor to your purpose.
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