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Spreadsheets are all you need

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Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#71

Post by wycy »

ramses0 wrote: post #70
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

Check out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.

This seems quite hidden. Googling "google appsheets" results in "did you mean 'google sheets'?" and showing only results for google sheets unless you specifically then request AppSheets.

It sounds cool, but I'd hate to rely on it since Google will probably shut it down.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#72

Post by IggleSniggle »

ccppurcell wrote: post #61
pipes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

Just an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country)…

Oh wow. Different poster same problem. Your comment made me realize that it's the "but I don't wanna!" attitude that I already know how to push through when it comes to language learning, just disguised differently. I'm still not sure that I wanna, tho...

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#73

Post by greenie_beans »

ramses0 wrote: post #70
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

Check out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.

love appsheets, very powerful.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#74

Post by seb1204 »

pipes wrote: post #35
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

There was a video from Joel Spolsky - you suck at excel. That is a good starting point

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#75

Post by tombert »

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months.

Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and maintaining this app would become a second, unpaid job.

Then I thought “I could just use a Google sheet and share it”, which is what I ended up doing. It’s easy to set permissions, I don’t have to worry about hosting, I can have it do any amount of arithmetic and light programming that I might need, as well as being automatic and reactive as I add information. It will be slower than something I would write in C obviously, but realistically for something involving budgeting the time savings will be on the order of milliseconds.

I love spreadsheets. They provide a gateway to programming for non-programmers, and they provide a low-effort means of playing with data.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#76

Post by thunfischtoast »

Jokes on you, my Excel regularily thinks that two cells are not equal, despite both of them having exactly the same value and type (also no trailing spaces or these things). Copy and pasting it around sometimes solves the problem, but it never is apparent to me why that happens.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#77

Post by tombert »

nxobject wrote: post #52

Now we wait for a GPU-accelerated Excel calculation engine to close the loop.

I had a coworker who had the idea of having a system that automatically compiling xlsx files to Apache Spark, so that you could have the easy interface of Excel while having the processing power of Spark to crunch bigger data sets.

He actually quit the company to build it; I should find out what came of that.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#78

Post by tombert »

thunfischtoast wrote: post #76

Jokes on you, my Excel regularily thinks that two cells are not equal, despite both of them having exactly the same value and type (also no trailing spaces or these things). Copy and pasting it around sometimes solves the problem, but it never is apparent to me why that happens.

Shot in the dark, but could this be some kind of IEEE floating point rounding shenanigans? Never had that issue in excel specifically, but I’ve certainly had that issue in C when trying to compare two floats that should be equal.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#79

Post by kitd »

throw0101d wrote: post #69

Related to strange things running in spreadsheets, if you want to see how a 16-bit CPU works, Inkbox has created one in a spreadsheet: * https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU A twenty-four instruction assembly language is also provided.

Reminds me of way back when I wrote a simple 8086 assembler in Lotus 123. It even worked for simple uses.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#80

Post by kitd »

makeitdouble wrote: post #48
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

I wonder at what point we stop calling them "spreadsheets" though. You mention Excel, and a bunch of us do it Google Sheets, but at this point it's not about sheets of data anymore and more about the interface and runtime, and we have full applications running in it. I remember a colleague running API tests inside his Excel sheet to more easily check for the different parameter combinations, but telling everyone he w…

A spreadsheet is really just an easily accessible, visual, functional programming environment. I think the question is not how to make spreadsheets more programmable, but how to make programming IDEs as simple as spreadsheets.
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