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I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

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Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#91

Post by viraptor »

beefield wrote: post #86
TBurette wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Excel Tables are for. You get a table within your spreadsheet and instead of using cell references like =Sum(C2:C7), you can use structured reference like =SUM(DeptSales[Sales Amount])

I have quite actively tried to avoid excel lately (which means also avoiding to learn new tricks...), and I am not that familiar with tables. Do the tables: 1. Enforce same data type per column. I.e., if you have a number in C4, you can't enter text into C5? 2. Enforce that if there is a formula, it is applied identically to each row? (By enforcing I mean that there is _no_ way around that short of copying the data t…

1. Not enforced as far as I can tell. But I believe the formatting can be set per-column only, not per-cell inside the table.

2. It's a default formula that gets repeated, but you may be able to override.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#92

Post by kfk »

And as I grow older I get more and more convinced that Excel is overrated. I ask myself, WHY in Excel so popular? And I keep coming back to the same answer: because it's live. But we do have this concept in the programming community (see links 1 and 2) and it's not theoretical. When I teach Python I see people quickly understand everything that can be made live. Do this, create a variable, then create a function, then let them play with the variable and see how the output changes. This is also why SQL is so popular, because you "declare" it and forget it and you see the changes live.

Don't get me wrong, I love Excel, but it has its problems and it definitely is not a solution to everything data.

[1] PANE: http://joshuahhh.com/projects/pane/ [2] LIVE: https://2018.splashcon.org/track/live-2018-papers#event-over...

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#93

Post by mirimir »

MooMooMilkParty wrote: post #55
mirimir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the same hardware, with the same table, Excel in Windows 7 does a cross-tab faster than MySQL in Ubuntu does. Indeed, MySQL chokes if there are more than a few hundred columns, but Excel just keeps going. And it uses all CPU cores. Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I did that, I wanted a simple visualization of ping-location results for thousands of IPv4 from several hundred ping-probe locations. So that meant…

You're blowing my mind here a little bit. I don't use MySQL but do use Excel and the R/Python data science stacks quite a bit. I regularly open data with tens or even hundreds of thousands of columns in the latter by using lazy computations. Is this not the case with database approaches? What kind of hardware are we talking? Presumably Excel has to load everything into memory at once since it's immediately viewable,…

In MySQL, maximum row size for non-text columns is 65,535 bytes. MySQL is limited to 4096 columns per table, and 1017 columns per table if the InnoDB engine is being used.

Excel's limits are 16384 columns and 1048576 rows.

I'm talking wimpy hardware here, I admit. Basically, VirtualBox VMs on a quad-core i5 box with SSD and 8GB RAM. With the VM having three cores and 6GB RAM. But it was the same wimpy hardware for Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#94

Post by viraptor »

skrebbel wrote: post #67
viraptor wrote: post #21

My issue with spreadsheets is that they could be improved a lot with minimal changes, not nobody seems to do it in popular office packages. Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works. Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fac…

> the fact it's too easy to I'm not sure you fully appreciate why Excel is so successful.

No, I fully understand that this is great for many users and that it cannot be made harder in any way to make whatever mess you want on a single sheet - or excel would die. I only want it easier to not do that. (There's nothing guiding people to better design right now)

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#96

Post by fartcannon »

tsimionescu wrote: post #88
keyle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you handle sharing? The main issue with Excel, and its main downfall, is the sharing of data and versioning, with person X has an older version of person Y by a few hours and needs an email of person X to keep doing her job.

Sharing Excel sheets is extremely easy - you just mail them, or host them in some online place, like SharePoint if you've bought into the whole MS ecosystem like many companies do. Not sure what your point is there. Versioning is of course more difficult, though Excel does support diffing in principle. I expect though that what most people end up doing is simply keeping track of versions manually, same as they would…

Diffing in principle is not diffing in reality. It's terrible at best. I 'm not sure what your point is.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#97

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

keyle wrote: post #72
mirimir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the same hardware, with the same table, Excel in Windows 7 does a cross-tab faster than MySQL in Ubuntu does. Indeed, MySQL chokes if there are more than a few hundred columns, but Excel just keeps going. And it uses all CPU cores. Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I did that, I wanted a simple visualization of ping-location results for thousands of IPv4 from several hundred ping-probe locations. So that meant…

Meanwhile open any document in Photoshop with a few layers and effects and the computer grinds to a halt, no matter the specs, no matter the year, through the ages. New hardware comes out? Booya, new Photoshop XYZ -> let's put your fancy hardware on its knees, begging for air.

while paying a monthly fee...

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#98

Post by incongruity »

mikekchar wrote: post #85

My biggest problem with Excel as a "solution" is that document control is kind of an afterthought. You've got X number of people in your organisation and they each have these adhoc collections of Excel spreadsheets. Usually the devil is in the details and you'll have one person who has calculated gross revenue one way and another person who has done it another way. The two approaches are never reconciled, but their o…

It’s absolutely fair to blame excel. It obfuscates the code in favor of displaying the calculated values - it’s designed to hide the code - which, along with a number of other design decisions, makes it really hard to build an error free spreadsheet beyond trivial sized cases.

Further, its design makes reproducible data practices difficult - in contrast to R or Python which do a lot to separate code from data - and let you re-run the same code on new/updated data. Python and R (and other non-spreadsheet tools) encourage practices that make keeping raw data pristine with work being done on copies of the data. In contrast, it’s really easy to make mistakes with Excel in ways you’ll never catch. Sorting within filtered columns is a good example. Did you add another column after creating the auto filter? Surprise, data in that column won’t sort with all the other data when you use re-sort one of the original columns. Just like that, poof, silent data corruption with no easy way of reverting if the error isn’t caught quickly.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#99

Post by piokoch »

whyenot wrote: post #48

Just don't try to use dates before January 1, 1900 (or 1904 on Mac). You can work with dates in Excel 1,000 years in the future, but if you try to do that for dates from the 1800s it will completely screw them up. I don't understand why this problem still exists today. If you work in a museum, or anywhere else where you deal with old dates, you have to constantly be on the lookout for this "gotcha."

This is not directly related to issues you see, but might shed some light: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... (plus this is one of the funnies Joel Spolsky's text and an amazing dive into computers history).

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#100

Post by aianus »

jedberg wrote: post #45

> and transmit not only the results of those calculations, but the actual environment itself, to anyone in the world, and expect that if they have a computer, they can replicate your results. I think this is the real secret. It's really the only kind of "model" where the environment travels with it. Everyone has the same Excel setup. If it works for you it will work for them.

Jupyter notebook in Docker?

Edit: I see someone made the same point below, but I definitely haven’t had Excel installed in years. And that’s across multiple billion-dollar employers.

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