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The problem is that your average business user of Excel thinks type safety is a bug, not a feature. If Excel enforced types instead of guessing on your behalf,

The problem is that your average business user of Excel thinks type safety is a bug, not a feature. If Excel enforced types instead of guessing on your behalf, a lot of people would complain. And it would be really hard to explain why it is sometimes useful to have constraints to someone who normally sees Excel's flexibility as its main strength. I don't think I've ever seen a non coder use Excel in a sensible way: maintainable, easy to change, consistent meanings of entities, simple to understand. It's always a ball of spaghetti, even for pretty small projects. Loads of VLOOKUPs, external DLLs, buttons everywhere, vba files galore. Plus they lay out the cells haphazardly.

jrott 6y ago
Yeah excel produces hairballs so easily. From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying. On the other hand a ton of people that don't write software for a living and have no interest in code manage to produce things that help them do their job and automate a ton of tedious stuff.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Most people don't write novels or poetry for a living either, but we still need some grasp of basic writing skills like grammar and structuring. We're already moving towards a future where a lot of people have coding as part of their job, and we should expect them to know a few things.
  - jrott 6y ago
    Oh I totally agree. It’s just worth acknowledging where most bad excel spreadsheets come from or at least it gives me more patience with them.
- dgb23 6y ago
  > From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying. I think this might be a type of bias: The Excel sheets I usually look at as a programmer are from customers who want me to write an application for them. Typically because the conventional means (Excel sheets, directory structures, emails etc.) become unmaintainable. So we end up seeing the stuff that is bad for w/e reason. Often a combination of complexity, inconsistency, usability and sheer mass.

jrott 6y ago

Yeah excel produces hairballs so easily. From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying. On the other hand a ton of people that don't write software for a living and have no interest in code manage to produce things that help them do their job and automate a ton of tedious stuff.

lordnacho 6y ago
Most people don't write novels or poetry for a living either, but we still need some grasp of basic writing skills like grammar and structuring. We're already moving towards a future where a lot of people have coding as part of their job, and we should expect them to know a few things.
- jrott 6y ago
  Oh I totally agree. It’s just worth acknowledging where most bad excel spreadsheets come from or at least it gives me more patience with them.
dgb23 6y ago
> From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying. I think this might be a type of bias: The Excel sheets I usually look at as a programmer are from customers who want me to write an application for them. Typically because the conventional means (Excel sheets, directory structures, emails etc.) become unmaintainable. So we end up seeing the stuff that is bad for w/e reason. Often a combination of complexity, inconsistency, usability and sheer mass.