Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
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Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
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Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#2I agree with this one. People who don't know how to code can easily use spreadsheets in your everyday life. For example, to calculate your income and expenses. To track and monitor your finances.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#3I agree with this one. People who don't know how to code can easily use spreadsheets in your everyday life. For example, to calculate your income and expenses. To track and monitor your finances.
Spreadsheets are a great way to introduce coding to someone because the variables are visible - it's not some esoteric concept of memory and pointers, it's just whatever is in cell A3.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#4Can't disagree. Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful tools and the barrier to entry is very low.
The only situation I can think of where you should discourage their use is in those situations where you know for sure in advance that the application is going to outgrow the spreadsheet very soon and/or immediately. If you are building a new microservice that will serve a million customers per day, don't make the mockup in a spreadsheet.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#5Article raises some valid points but how do you catch the point where the spreadsheet gets out of control? Maybe MS could build in a warning system and then suggest some potential solutions.
Minor quibble: it's an Apple III in the ad, not an Apple ][ as the post says. I remember running Visicalc on my Apple ][ but it wasn't until Excel appeared that I realized how seductive spreadsheets can be.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#6Dang, what software engineers hate spreadsheets? I've never worked anywhere that didn't use them for project planning and other such stuff.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#7It's the interface: a grid of editable cells is incredibly easy to use and as almost as information-dense as possible.
It's interesting to see non-excel/google sheets products use the same interface to good effect. Examples don't come to mind but I'm sure there are some.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#8Spreadsheets versus programmers is a war that can be much more peaceful. In my work, I have found that, especially in data science, the spreadsheet user and the programmers are often trying to accomplish similar tasks, but the “language barrier” between them leads to much more fragmented workflows. I also think this article does a good job of identifying spreadsheets as a low-code programming language — spreadsheets are immensely powerful pieces of software. Along these lines — I’ve been building Mito (https://trymito.io/), a spreadsheet GUI for Python. Every edit you make in the spreadsheet generates the equivalent Python code.
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#9For what it's worth, I've now seen a couple times where the spreadsheet becomes too large and somebody hooks the spreadsheet up to a database so it does queries. That seems to work well for the users willing and able to learn some SQL, and it confuses most others which results in some really strange spreadsheets...
Re: Use Spreadsheets Everywhere
#10I agree with this one. People who don't know how to code can easily use spreadsheets in your everyday life. For example, to calculate your income and expenses. To track and monitor your finances.
I wonder how many bankruptcies could be avoided if more people just had some basic spreadsheet literacy.
Before I bought a house, I built a stupid simple model to understand what my monthly expenses would look like. What you get an appreciation for is that very quickly you can go from comfortable to precarious with just a few additional fixed expenses (childcare, a new car, a boat).
Without laying it all out and seeing how your numbers change, it's hard to get a visceral appreciation for your finances.