3 ms·

This sounds interesting but I don't quite understand. Is this idea documented somewhere more detailed?

• mulmen 7y ago
  Not really, maybe I should write something. It's a thought I frequently have in the depths of Excel Hell. I thought for a long time about why Excel is so frustrating to me. I think fundamentally it comes down to Excel putting the spreadsheet ahead of the data. If the data was clearly separated from the spreadsheet itself then the logic becomes much easier to reason about and test and the data is no longer susceptible to the Excel data loss. The display layer really needs to be logically separate from the data. For example if I change a column format from text to number and back I should not lose the leading zeros in the actual data. Spreadsheet tools are great visual programming environments but they are lousy databases. The data layer in Excel leaves a lot to be desired but there's really no reason a spreadsheet has to be so limited. Basically I'd like to see some kind of hybrid SQL(database) client/Spreadsheet UI/Pivot Table builder where all three concepts are first class.