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Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

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Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#91

Post by blowski »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #83
tomnipotent wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have no clue these features exist, or that Excel even has advanced data modeling that supports all sorts of goodies including strict types and joins/merges/appends. It's not as accessible as just basic sheets, but I've had no problem crunching millions of rows of data in Excel with sub-second response times.

isn't excel limited to just over a million rows?

Yes, although you can have multiple sheets each with a million rows. Kind of like sharding.

But I’d be fascinated what kind of system spec is required to get good performance on those kind of numbers. I’ve been on a Mac for years, where Excel is crippled by limitations.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#92

Post by jccalhoun »

Spreadsheet programs are incredibly powerful. I was a math education minor and one of the classes I remember most was using computers in the classroom and using spreadsheets to do things that aren't obvious like estimate square roots. (well at least not obvious to me)

However, I think spreadsheet programs are still way to complex for the vast majority of people. So many people are so math phobic that they won't even think of opening a spreadsheet.

One thing I've done with a spreadsheet a few dozen times is take the outputted CVS file my learning management system gives me in the form of last name, first name and convert it to first last in one cell. I still have to find the bookmarked answer I found years ago and cut and paste it in and I don't really understand how it works.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#93

Post by bhl »

andrewlgood wrote: post #43
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is dead on from an analysis/criticism/insight: devs are called in when it's a sinking ship and don't see all the cargo the ship has hauled. Why hasn't microsoft or someone taken the basic spreadsheet model to a shared-database scalable one? The UI is basically set at this point. A naive schema (filename, tab, x, y, value) is what an excel sheet is. It's not like we are dealing with "impedence mismatch" a…

How would you put guardrails on the spreadsheets to make sure spreadsheets do not accidently damage the database performance through bad calls? In the hierarchy of skills, SQL is significantly less prevalent that spreadsheets.

Perhaps you could come up with a list of commonly-used functions and write optimized SQL functions for them, such that users start off learning with that API and gradually learn SQL when they're more comfortable.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#94

Post by usehackernews »

As a product manager, spreadsheets have been an incredible asset to build products when I had limited resources and to iterate quickly.

When we had no front-end devs available - we used Googles sheets API, connected our spreadsheets to our production DB, and did all the input of raw data, and ingestion of outputs automatically. User interaction happened within the spreadsheets.

When FE devs opened up, we eventually built the UI to replace the spreadsheet (Which is a very hard task, spreadsheets are good at what they do). But by this point, we knew exactly what we needed in the ux and had iterated on the ux multiple times.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#95

Post by gbrown »

testudovictoria wrote: post #64
gbrown wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for - I think you might have just reinvented MS Access.

I was going to say that I have a small, very limited amount of experience with MS Access. I agree; the middle ground between Excel and databases sounds very similar to Access. We had been using Excel for org charts like most places. We wanted to add grouping, metadata, and neatly be able to extend/add information with or without constraints. This was much before I knew anything database related, and Access seemed to…

I was mostly being glib, but I've had some bad experiences with Access over the years. I actually think lightweight database and scripting utilities in Excel could be good, but it would be susceptible to some of the design traps that Access steps on.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#96

Post by kstrauser »

linker3000 wrote: post #20

If you have had to fill multiple, spreadsheet-based, customers' InfoSec questionnaire about your SaaS product, including the need for tailored, multi-paragraph answers (ie: you can't copy/paste from stock responses), you might disagree with the raw headline.

Are you me? I feel this in my bones.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#97

Post by Arrath »

Zababa wrote: post #68
LegitGandalf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tables are probably the most overlooked feature of Excel. Why use tables? * Each column is uniquely named - no more wondering if you are referencing the right cell, no more thinking about "to $ or not to $" * The table's rows and columns are reliably discovered by pivot tables - no more wondering if the entire dataset is referenced by the pivot * New columns that are formulas are automatically applied to every row *…

About tables, do they work when you automate the data entry part? For example, copy from a speadsheet into your spreadsheet with the first macro, and then transform the data with a second? That's 90% of my use case for Excel. (I know that doing this in Python/whatever would be "better" but I have to distribute this to users, and the only thing they have on their computer is Excel, and they're gonna manipulate the dat…

They should...I think.

If anything add a 'ActiveSheet.Calculate' call to the end of your second macro and give it a test run?

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#98

Post by jayd16 »

asdff wrote: post #73
jayd16 wrote: post #32

We need a spreadsheet format that's more conducive to the professional programmer workflow. Parsing them is actually very complex. You just have to hope your library can handle everything in excel. If you're a cli native I'm not really sure what you do. Spreadsheets don't play very will with source control. If the underlying format was text and every cell and formula was on a new line it would work out ok. As it is n…

> We need a spreadsheet format that's more conducive to the professional programmer workflow. CSV or TSV, pick your flavor.

Has all the problems I mentioned.

Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere

#100

Post by ianmcgowan »

castillar76 wrote: post #89

There's a real back-and-forth struggle for me with spreadsheets. I find people very frequently reach for them for things that they do really well: data slicing and dicing, ordering and sorting, formulae that cross-reference cells, and so forth. However, the contents of those spreadsheets are often (for me) not numeric, but text, and working with text that's longer than a few words in Excel is still a huge PITA, even…

This would be great - I find people reach for excel out of familiarity when they need to keep track of textual information like tasks, issues, risks etc. Semi-structured data with a lot of text and not a lot of numbers can quickly become unworkable in excel. If the whole OLE thing had worked out things might be easier - being able to mix the data-wrangling of excel with the content manipulation of word would be awesome.

A really simplified version of access that works from one underlying spreadsheet as a data source perhaps?

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