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Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

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Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#71

Post by jiggawatts »

spockz wrote: post #63
unsupp0rted wrote: post #13

Recently I started building Excel addons with custom formulas (e.g. =company.inventory(upc, WAREHOUSE), which call an api. This has blown the minds of non-tech folks among my clients. They equate this to magic. I was forced into doing this because after a year of digging to find out what reporting they wanted in the dashboard (“oh a thousand things… where’s the Excel spreadsheet export button?”), I gave up and now de…

Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.

Microsoft essentially abandoned it. They hoped that a bunch of random Azure services would be its replacement, but they're too scattered and incomplete compared to Access.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#72

Post by sideshowb »

sxg wrote: post #16
cratermoon wrote: post #4

Great. Can they fix the autocorrect so it doesn't mangle gene names? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4

Excel is a generic spreadsheet program that's designed to be used by 90% of people for 90% of use cases. Accommodating for this niche use case will definitely break things for many existing users. The real solution is for geneticists (and other data scientists) to use software designed more specifically for their use cases, such as CSV files and pandas or something more GUI-based but meant for researchers.

"Not mangling stuff the user types in", yes, very niche requirement that, highly unlikely to benefit anyone but geneticists /s ;-)

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#73

Post by gadtfly »

logicallee wrote: post #54

For anyone who writes Excel formulas, it is one of the use cases for ChatGPT (a currently free chatbot that appears highly intelligent in some contexts) that users rave the most about. The next time you're writing an excel formula, give chatgpt a try. It might just get it right the first time.

This almost certainly is GPT. OpenAI has an exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#74

Post by jimmygrapes »

spockz wrote: post #63
unsupp0rted wrote: post #13

Recently I started building Excel addons with custom formulas (e.g. =company.inventory(upc, WAREHOUSE), which call an api. This has blown the minds of non-tech folks among my clients. They equate this to magic. I was forced into doing this because after a year of digging to find out what reporting they wanted in the dashboard (“oh a thousand things… where’s the Excel spreadsheet export button?”), I gave up and now de…

Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.

My theory is that InfoPath killed Access. People wanted to use the "easy interface for Nancy in Marketing to submit a purchasing request" and got bogged down with XPath and SharePoint/ActiveDirectory fuckery, and weren't quite to the level where they could grasp MSSQL (or IT had disabled this or that, forcing the one ambitious "computer guy" in Finance to cludge together something with the tools available). Using Access would have been ideal but it was a time when MS was pushing things like InfoPath and Sway and the like, and simultaneously there were issues with concurrency and "omg macro virus" cybersecurity focus. Access got better but it was already tainted.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#75

Post by omgomgomgomg »

dmurray wrote: post #51
capableweb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually try running the code vs the formula and compared it works the same way in the expected cases? The times I've tried using ChatGPT, it has mostly giving me code that seems like it'd work but doesn't.

"ChatGPT, can you give me some test cases for the code?"

This is interesting, would ChatGPT know to wrap everything in am iferror and can it create new sheets and book and save them as csv on any os?

This took me a full week to make it work and got me a raise, but it is so hacky, I rather not want to maintain that.

Can it run cron jobs, handle api responses etc?

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#76

Post by nerdponx »

function_seven wrote: post #2

My current #1 wish for Excel formula entry: Please let me use [Tab] and [Enter] in the formula bar without trying to commit the change! I like to format my formulas with multiple lines and indentation, but to do that I have to hold down [Alt] and mash the spacebar like a caveman. I am happy with the new features I've been seeing. LAMBDA() and the new TEXT functions are nifty.

I want a pop-out formula editor window, and a menu along the side of the formula editor that lets me search for functions by name, and drag/drop them into the formula editor window.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#77

Post by beckingz »

sideshowb wrote: post #69
axelf4 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As my professor said: All good statistics is done before you have looked at the data.

But where do you get your hypothesis from?

your hypothetical model of reality.

But that's a lot of work so businesses don't want to pay for it.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#78

Post by chiph »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #13

Recently I started building Excel addons with custom formulas (e.g. =company.inventory(upc, WAREHOUSE), which call an api. This has blown the minds of non-tech folks among my clients. They equate this to magic. I was forced into doing this because after a year of digging to find out what reporting they wanted in the dashboard (“oh a thousand things… where’s the Excel spreadsheet export button?”), I gave up and now de…

This is probably the second-most-proud-of thing I worked on in my career, based on an off-hand comment from one of our salespeople: "Why can't our customers use Excel to view their data?" Another developer and I wrote the first version in a couple of weeks - an Excel VBA add-in that used IBM SNA APPC to communicate with their AS/400 (I later upgraded it to use TCP/IP sockets).

Because the salespeople didn't know how to use or sell it yet, I got to be the one to travel to our first customer and train them on it. After showing their CFO how to add our formulas to a couple of cells, make a chart from it, and then hit Shift+F9 to refresh the formulas and get current data from their AS/400, he pushed me away from the keyboard and quickly entered several more formulas to bring in additional data. And then told me I had just saved him three day's work every month when he created charts for his reports to the board.

I eventually left the company, and they got bought a couple of times by ever-bigger software companies. But the product is still out there and is very versatile, having been extended to talk to many different ERP & accounting systems. It even still has the same product name: Spreadsheet Server.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#79

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

function_seven wrote: post #2

My current #1 wish for Excel formula entry: Please let me use [Tab] and [Enter] in the formula bar without trying to commit the change! I like to format my formulas with multiple lines and indentation, but to do that I have to hold down [Alt] and mash the spacebar like a caveman. I am happy with the new features I've been seeing. LAMBDA() and the new TEXT functions are nifty.

If you have multiple lines of formula, you should probably break up the formula across a few cells. This is similar to breaking up a long script into modules... each cell should have 1 purpose. Allows better testing of the formulas too.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#80

Post by ilyt »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #79
function_seven wrote: post #2

My current #1 wish for Excel formula entry: Please let me use [Tab] and [Enter] in the formula bar without trying to commit the change! I like to format my formulas with multiple lines and indentation, but to do that I have to hold down [Alt] and mash the spacebar like a caveman. I am happy with the new features I've been seeing. LAMBDA() and the new TEXT functions are nifty.

If you have multiple lines of formula, you should probably break up the formula across a few cells. This is similar to breaking up a long script into modules... each cell should have 1 purpose. Allows better testing of the formulas too.

That's just ugly hack, formulas are essentially code and should be treated liek that
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