I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the ability to import that same format.
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
71–80 of 201 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#72Excel is Turing-complete :P
Turing-Machines are Turing-complete, too.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#73Excel doesn't work well on very large spreadsheets (I use it on some sheets with over 150,000 rows.) Things are slow to load, and commands like lookups are extremely slow, enough that I think they're doing O(n) lookups for things like the VLOOKUP command, even when looking up data on tables or sorted columns. What makes the above even worse is that Excel has a pretty poor understanding of when a change necessitates a…
Use $ to keep copy/fill from autoincrementing. $E$5
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#74Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#75Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#76Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#77Here are some features that would be nice in Excel: 1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?). 2. Online spreadsheets like Google. 3. Better search and replace. 4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML. Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the t…
#1 is possible using COM automation. You can write an app that interfaces with Excel via COM, or integrate your own functionality into Excel by developing a COM add-in.
#5 can be done in Excel by implementing an RTD server (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP030662371033.aspx). An interesting example is here: http://fransking.blogspot.com/2007/03/yfquotertd-real-time-d...
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#78I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a dictionary in a cell.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#79A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before.
findincolumn('john',a) scrollaccross(3) retrievedata
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#80Best ideas I have here:
* Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets.
* Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull in other people's spreadsheets across the world to use as one of your cells (somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, I suppose)
* Alternatively, I'd like to see Excel go three dimensional for a single sheet. At a minimum perhaps use "layers" like Photoshop would to apply transformations and adaptations that collapse into the final view.
* I'd prefer this imaginary Excel also use Python or JavaScript for cell programming/calculations.
* I second the versioning information idea, too-- keep a history of every manual change to every cell and allow them to be reverted. In a git-esque way, support branching of cells, etc.