Somewhat related, this is a fantastic talk about the design of the first electronic spreadsheet VisiCalc by Dan Bricklin:
The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
71–80 of 282 posts
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#72Earlier 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 are also learning excel because that's the only way to program in a big company without going through "official IT", which won't listen to what you have to say if you're not a $100 000 project they can offload to a third-party.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#73I hate Excel, not because it's a bad program but because in my experience people misuse it more often than not. Excel excels at creating spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are pretty reports used to report tabular data. Excel is capable of so much more, but for eveything beyond spreadsheets it's medicore at best and its complexity often makes it a liability. It's a bad calculator. It's a bad database. It's a bad medium for t…
Nah. Spreadsheets are poor man's MapReduce.
Most Excel tables I've seen aren't just data and presentation. It's computing the data as well as presenting it.
And how is the data computed?
* Applying formula to a row/column range to get another range
* Applying formula to a range to get a single-cell output out of it
Obviously, I am not talking about clustering and performance here, but a computational paradigm.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#74Spreadsheets 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…
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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#75Spreadsheets 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.
Spreadsheets are great. I just wish folks would use a more appropriate tool for what they really want: a very light-touch database. Something like Airtable is perfect for structuring a bit of data into rows and columns.
But, nothing beats the availability (both of sharing and editing) of an open Google Sheet.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#76Yes, hijack my scrolling. I really don't like have a consistent feedback when I am scrolling pages.
Dunno why you're being downvoted but it's true. I noticed it pretty quickly when I tried going back to the previous page and instead it scrolled up.
They're being downvoted because it's against the rules to criticize the design of the site on which the content is hosted.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I assume they mean performance wise. Excel could have larger hard limits but handle complex sheets worse.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#78I hate Excel, not because it's a bad program but because in my experience people misuse it more often than not. Excel excels at creating spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are pretty reports used to report tabular data. Excel is capable of so much more, but for eveything beyond spreadsheets it's medicore at best and its complexity often makes it a liability. It's a bad calculator. It's a bad database. It's a bad medium for t…
I think this is a really unfair comment. Excel is a very powerful tool. It's great for financial modelling and prototyping, for example. It can be great for testing out different scenarios and investigating likely outcomes. It's also something that most people in most businesses have installed and as such, can be incredibly helpful for sharing data, models, etc. The collaborative editing in Office 365 adds a new dime…
I think you missed my point.
Yes, Excel is a very powerful tool and I would never argue otherwise. I definitely wouldn't argue against using it altogether. But I have come to loathe it because of how often it is misused.
Sure, any tool can be misused. But in my experience Excel gets misused more than anything else combined. Excel's accessibility and ubiquity is part of what makes it so powerful... and what compels people to use it where other tools are much better suited.
Don't get me wrong. It's okay to use a suboptimal tool... to a point. Users should be aware of a tool's limitations and seek out better solutions when it's clear those limitations will cause problems.
Excel is not a bad tool. It's so popular because it really is a good tool. It's just not the ultimate tool.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#79Spreadsheets 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.
Many power users of excel do use more capable, testable and readable solutions. But they also use excel. Programming sucks in many ways that excel does not. Excel is incredibly flexible and adaptable.
If you need to treat one row differently as a special case that is easy in excel but can be a lot of work with programming, both for technical reasons (you need to handle the special case with special code) and for silly reasons (in excel you click the row which is special; in a program you must describe how to find the row.) Certainly there is an argument that one shouldn’t have such special cases as they make maintainability a nightmare but sometimes it matters a lot more to have something now rather than something later.
In excel, the data is the most important thing and in the real world it often is too. In a program, the data (especially the intermediate data) is quite invisible. Power users may spot errors because intermediate values look wrong, rather than by carefully reading the formulas. Though if the values look right or there are a lot of them, errors may not be spotted.
Excel is very ad-hoc which is the problem people complain about but also it’s power in dealing with the changing real world and anything exploratory. Once it is working and stable in excel, it is more wise to do it in python.
Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
#80Shouldn't Excel warn you if your data is going to be truncated? Or did they use Excel in a way that suppressed such warnings?