71–80 of 123 posts
F2 should enable the user to trace calculations back to the original data, not only the current calculation step.
In basis spreadsheet, this would yield a jumble of steps that are undocumented and hard to parse. But that's where the python, lambdas and custome functions come in: They enable legibility of turboF2.
The pro version has quite a price tag, so I’m assuming they have a big value add.
One should note that this comes from xlwings, a Python-in-Excel plugin with a $1,490 professional lifetime license. Excel's changes will end up eating their reason to exist.
Jetbrains still makes delightful products, even though MS had been pushing their turd of an editor onto everyone since forever...
Some alternate ideas: - make a python library/driver for Excel sheets that imitates Pandas Dataframe API but (a) has reactive cells (b) imports equations from Excel - make a notebook IDE that integrates excel spreadsheets. Make everything reactive. Have a split notebook/spreadsheet view. A little off-topic but it would be rad if Excel had more Airtable/Baserow/Grist features.
Maybe its time to start fresh with a clean sheet? (Pun). The spreadsheet paradigm is immensely intuitive and arguably the only alternative to the standard procedural programming currently in use in number crumching. But therein lies also a major weakness when used for important tasks: hard to validate. Once you further combine it with API calls and whatnot, the situation gets totally out of hand: how do you reproduce…
Yes, we do need some kind of tabular data UIs but SMALL UIs elements, not the base of the UI. Beside that the obscene "wrapping" of Python to make it "user-safe" makes also it next to useless.
A less ugly approach to tabular UIs is the one from R-Studio, while it's limited, another is org-mode tables while again they are limited in UI terms. Both are a bit better than Jupyter REPL model witch is itself far better than a spreadsheet.
Without interacting with it myself, none of this is surprising. I have used excel in the past, and I am a long term python user. But if you asked me today what I really wanted to make my life easier and ultimately a product or business better using only excel? I would ask for lua or scheme. I don’t need a batteries included environment embedded into a spreadsheet. I just want sane syntax for common functionality whic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Excel still lets you name cells, does it not? It does, but that too is a half assed feature so users struggle with it IRL
Excel implementers struggle with it. Half the features of Excel cannot deal with named cells. Try for example to use named cells in Conditional Formatting. Doesn't work at all, ranges cannot be named cells or tables, and condition formulas can only reference named cells with extremely ugly contortions. There are lots and lots of additional examples of similar problems. Excel is a loose agglomeration of unrelated feat…