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>One of Mehrotra’s chief frustrations with the older generation of documents was what he calls “the game of Battleship” — the need to describe rows and columns
by jasode 9y ago
>One of Mehrotra’s chief frustrations with the older generation of documents was what he calls “the game of Battleship” — the need to describe rows and columns in formulas using headings like “A1 to F7,” as in the old board game. In Coda documents, rows and columns are named objects, making formulas both easier to read and write.
Lotus Improv from 1991 had "names" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Quantrix from 2003 also has named "items" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Neither product had widespread adoption.
It seems plausible that cryptic rowcolumns would be a major paint point for most Excel users but maybe it isn't.
Quantrix found a niche in financial modeling so maybe that domain of users (~50k users) value features like that enough to not use Excel.
Google Sheets continued the tradition of cryptic rowcols and has more adoption than either of those alternative products. (Probably because it costs $0.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
[2] https://www.quantrix.com/QuantrixandExcelWhitePaper.pdf https://www.quantrix.com/QuantrixandExcelWhitePaper.pdf
- mmc 9y agoExcel also has named rows/columns and cells - one of the bunch of useful tips I learned from Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" presentation - here's the part where he covers that: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=25m54s https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=25m54s
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mschaef 9y agoExcel also supports Multiplan-style RC syntax for cell addresses, if you like. I find the syntax a bit more clear, but ultimately too verbose to be useful. R1C1 = Row 1, Column 1. R[1]C[1] = cell one row over and one row down. One other point worth mentioning is that cell-relative references in Excel are more pervasive than they might appear. For example, you can specify a conditional format formula that highlights a cell if it has a different value than the cell immediately above. (Or a number of other more considerably complex scenarios.) Range names work this way too... it's possible to define a range of the form "three cells to the right of the current cell".
- apricot 9y agoMultiplan... now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
- thanatropism 9y agoExcel has named columns with "tables". Random tutorial off Google: https://www.excel-university.com/indirectly-refer-to-table-columns/ https://www.excel-university.com/indirectly-refer-to-table-c...
- lozenge 9y agoExcel 2007 solved the naming problem with tables. You can refer to cells in the same row, or an entire column or range of columns. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-references-with-Excel-tables-f5ed2452-2337-4f71-bed3-c8ae6d2b276e https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-re... Edit: and of course individual cells can be renamed since forever.
- mschaef 9y agoData tables can also make things considerably faster. A colleague of mine once made a spreadsheet something like an order of magnitude faster by switching to data tables. (Maybe more speedup than that, even.)
- cm2187 9y agoAssuming all you ever care about is tabular data. If you are building a business plan in Excel, or trying to explain how the financial accounts consolidates in a large organisation with multiple subsidiaries, tables are not particular useful. That's the catch with Excel. One application, thousands of very different use cases.
- Gaelan 9y agoNumbers (Apple) also names cells based on row/column headers.
- fusiongyro 9y agoApple's Numbers spreadsheet has this feature today as well.
- cm2187 9y agoWhat I love about Apple's Numbers is the canvas approach. An idea that if Microsoft should steal if they were still developing Excel.
- fusiongyro 9y agoI like it quite a bit myself. But I don't make heavy use of spreadsheets.
- agumonkey 9y agowhat would that be ? googling for apple numbers canvas is not very fruitful https://www.google.fr/search?tbm=isch&q=Apple+Numbers+canvas&tbs=imgo:1&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=31HwWeOELIj7aIrnquAN https://www.google.fr/search?tbm=isch&q=Apple+Numbers+canvas...
- cm2187 9y agoThis is a good example: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/software/detail-page/numbers-hero.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/software... Basically a sheet is a blank canvas on which you can drop tables or charts or other things. You can see on the left the list of the sheets, and within the list of the objects they contain. It has all sorts of benefits over Excel's one grid approach: - You can display two tables, one above the other, and the first can overflow without pushing the bottom table off-screen - You can display two tables, one above the other, and the columns do not have to be aligned / have the same width (I am sure everyone using excel ran into this problem), same thing for row height for side by side tables. - If these tables contain data, it allows to separate logically data on the same sheet instead of relying on empty columns as a convention. You can then filter the two tables independently but have both always visible on the same sheet - Makes more sense for positioning charts vs tables - Preserves the full flexibility of a generic excel grid, i.e. one object could be a table containing data, the other could be some complex calculation, etc. Excel has some ways to present data in a similar way but at this stage it is just summary data, not a generic spreadsheet
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 9y agoAnyone trying to unseat Excel is going to have the same problems as people trying to unseat Facebook: they already have lock-in of the vast majority of the userbase. I use Google Sheets for most spreadsheet work now, but I was never heavily invested in Excel. Everyone I know who is a serious Excel user just isn't interested in anything else. Excel does everything they need it to do, and they have years worth of templates and formulas developed for all their needs.
- mirimir 9y agoExcel is also extremely robust. You can, for example, do VLOOKUP between tables that are ~10K columns by 100K rows. And it just does it. And pauses/restarts calculating, if you need to tweak something. But Calc? It just freezes, and eventually dies, and then must rebuild the file after restart. Which may end up being impossible. Indeed, Excel will do pivot tables that choke MySQL :) And it uses multiple processors.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI do a lot of work in calc but there is a definite problem with large files..and they aren't solved by adjusting thr included memory options.
- mirimir 9y agoYeah. I've tried messing with those too. No luck. Calc seems to crap out at about 10 MB. Anything over 5 MB is prone to freezing. Especially if you use AutoFilter. The first time I encountered the file-repair prompt, it was total déjà vu to the DOS era ;)
- SubiculumCode 9y agoYes Autofilter kills performance even moderate sized files.
- osullivj 9y agoThat's a key point. If you want to get a share of the Excel user base, you're new offering needs to be Excel compatible.
- joshvm 9y agoI don't know what the intersection of 'most' and 'power' Excel users is, but as a very casual user I rarely need to explicitly type cell references because I can click to select which cell I'm referring to in the formula. Since Excel does multicolour highlighting it's easy to check that the right cell was selected. If I need an absolute reference (or whatever) I can go in afterwards and modify appropriately. Named cells does significantly improve the readability of spreadsheets at a later date though!
- Avshalom 9y agoI suspect path dependence (and price for quantrix) more than anything is what keeps Excel in charge. I mean even beyond just switching costs: Excel is for instance the only format for getting data from http://www.earthchem.org/petdb/ http://www.earthchem.org/petdb/ or, to keep harping on geologists, people that keep implementing models in excel: which you then have to use because nobody trusts code you wrote yourself. and it only gets worse with time.
- greedo 9y agoYet ironically, Excel introduces errors. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pap...
- Avshalom 9y agoI don't know if it's ironic in any useful sense, so much as fucking depressing. though yes a calculator that refuses to let you enter numbers correctly is some 'Time Enough at Last' levels of irony.
- mirimir 9y agoIt's not specific to Excel. Calc does it too. Turning off all that auto-correct bullshit is one of the first things that I do with a new install.
- jakewalker 9y agoLotus Improv was one of the best programs I've ever used, and I wish it would come back in a modern form. It was much more sophisticated than just having "names" instead of row/column coordinates. It had an easier to use and in some ways more powerful version of PivotTables. Man, I miss Improv.
- zokier 9y agoFrankly that statement puts the whole company into poor light; if you are building an Excel competitor, you better know Excel pretty well. If your chief frustration is battleship coordinates then that does not exactly evoke the feeling Excel expertise, or that they have done sufficient market research. Or maybe they are not really targeting Excel as hard as the article posits?
- mschaef 9y ago> If your chief frustration is battleship coordinates I read that more as a way to demean Excel by comparing it to a toy than any kind of exhaustive list of complaints...
- zokier 9y agoPoint being that if he actually knew Excel then he'd also know that Excel supports named columns just fine. With statement like that, he presents himself as ignorant of the basic features of their main competitor, which is not exactly great way to win the power-users of mentioned competitor.
- mschaef 9y agoI'd be inclined to attribute that to messaging more than understanding. I hear what you're saying, but a fully qualified statement that captures all of the details both loses a lot of impact and isn't the kind of thing that would appear in the Verge.
- socialentp 9y agoExactly. It's the same problem as communication of science to the general public: if you make it 100% accurate, most people either won't understand or won't care. After enough customer interviews you start to get a sense of what gets people nodding their heads, and that's what makes it into these articles. Assuming that statements like this reflect a company's complete understanding of the problem just isn't fair.
- 9y ago
- jasoncrawford 9y agoIt turns out that not having to name things is a feature. Users often avoid naming things and dislike being forced to do so. The reason is what developers already know: naming things is hard! (Two hard problems, etc.) Of course, developers also know how valuable good names are, so we like to take the time to pick good names. Users would rather just skip naming altogether and refer to things by letter/number or just by clicking on them.
- pavlov 9y agoYes, clicking on "this thing right here!" is a powerful way for ordinary users to create references. It shouldn't be underestimated. Programmers are so used to having to name things that we don't see the mental overhead of using names. A named cell is conceptually a pointer -- you can change what it points to (by giving the same name to some other cell instead), and if you delete the referent, it can point to nothing. That kind of invisible indirection is not easy for non-programmers.
- DonHopkins 9y agoAn important thing about cell references that makes them almost but not quite entirely unlike pointers is that they can be relative, absolute, or mixed. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Switch-between-relative-absolute-and-mixed-references-dfec08cd-ae65-4f56-839e-5f0d8d0baca9 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Switch-between-rela...
- pavlov 9y agoAren’t named cells/columns a category of their own? They’re not relative nor absolute, but resolved by the name binding that exists at evaluation time.
- jasode 9y ago>It turns out that not having to name things is a feature. I think this is one of those great insightful points that's counterintuitive and yet has abundant real-world evidence we can't deny. I'd guess that vast majority (99%) of programmers that program in languages requiring explicit variable names (Python, C, Java, Go, etc) will still use Excel without named cells nor named columns. Yes, they will label their adjacent cells with freeform text (e.g. "TOTAL PRICE:") but they won't use the Excel "named regions" feature to be referenced in formulas. How do we reconcile the inconsistent attitude we have about the benefits of names?!? It turns out that yes, naming cells is a form of "code documentation" and helps avoid "spaghetti formulas" -- but it's also a friction. If programmers using Excel eschew cell names, it's a given regular users will too. It also doesn't help that "names" in Excel is not a 1st class feature. It's a separate menu item and the name is a hidden "alias" for the cell. With other products, the "name" of the cell is what you type into the box right there on the sheet. The UI for giving a cell a name is more immediate.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob2 9y agoDoes it really make sense for someone who doesn't understand the concept of 2D Cartesian coordinates to be using a spreadsheet at all? "Battleship coordinates" are pretty darned far down the list of Things Wrong with Excel. Considering you still can't open multiple instances the way every other Windows application on the planet works...
- frogpelt 9y agoOn Windows 7, Excel 2013 I can open multiple instances. They still share the same undo stack though.
- CamperBob2 9y agoIt can only open multiple instances if you launch them explicitly. If you click on multiple .xls(x) files, they will still open in the same window. It's just insanely stupid and nonstandard.
- kamaal 9y ago>>It seems plausible that cryptic rowcolumns would be a major paint point for most Excel users but maybe it isn't. Its not cryptic, its the most intuitive way of finding the position of a cell in a spreadsheet. ABCD ____ 1|abcd 2|efgh 3|ijkl 4|mnop 5|qrst 6|uvwx 7|yzAB It becomes a whole lot easier to give the position of the letter 's', I just have to say C5. Instead of giving a name which the user has to hunt in a large spreadsheet. Its easier to look up things in a sequence, than look at an arbitrary name. Besides you can always name a cell in Excel and use that in a formula.
- masklinn 9y ago> It becomes a whole lot easier to give the position of the letter 's', I just have to say C5. Except that doesn't work correctly if you move the formula around, whereas R5C3 does (and makes relative addressing very explicit).
- kamaal 9y agoHow is saying Row 'C' , Column '5' any different than saying Row '3', Column '5'. These are just ways of pointing to a cell with regards to its position from the cell at the top left column & top left row in the spreadsheet.
- masklinn 9y ago> How is saying Row 'C' , Column '5' any different than saying Row '3', Column '5'. Well an obvious reason is R1C1 clearly spells out which is the row and which is the column and further makes it very clear when you're using absolute addressing (RYCX) or relative (R[±Y]C[±X]). But that's not what I'm talking about in the previous comment. What I'm saying is that A1 is implicitly relative: open excel or google spreadsheet, type "=A1" in a cell, then copy/paste it to an other cell, it won't be "=A1" anymore it'll be offset by the difference between the source and destination cell and thus may have become e.g. "=C8". To fix that you have to "lock in" the dimensions by prefixing them with $ e.g. $A$1 does not move around at all, $A1 does not move in the column but may move in the row and A$1 does not move in the row but may move in the column. R1C1 does not have that issue, as a user you spell out explicitly whether you want absolute or relative addressing (in either dimension) and the software keeps thing exactly as specified.