5 ms·

Microsoft Overhauls Excel with Custom Data Types

70 points by applecrazy 6y ago

apalumbi 6y ago
I see alot of business use excel as a way to not engage with IT teams since they can get very far without building true systems for the their needs. So I am not sure if this is a feature that will lead to further entrenching of excel into non-enterprise applications or will enable teams to more easily disconnect from excel as the tool to do all things. I guess time will tell.
chanmad29 6y ago
Might be unpopular opinion: Excel is best with no frills and just does what it does best- simple, quick and stable. Power BI can continue to have whatever enhancements MS wants to push.
iso8859-1 6y ago
I see they use the term "Linked Data". Does it interoperate with RDF? Can I use it with Wikidata?
erhserhdfd 6y ago
Obligatory "I don't understand why people still use Excel and just don't learn to program" comment
- tshanmu 6y ago
  it allows more agile delivery :P
- llimos 6y ago
  It's those pushing programming who need to answer why it's so much better, since the Excel approach does seem to work for large numbers of people.
- linguae 6y ago
  I'd venture out and guess that Excel is probably the most widely used programming environment in the world. Excel macros are a type of programming language, and there are many businesses that rely on complex Excel spreadsheets as part of their operations. The fact that these are called macros and not a programming language might be a reason why they are so heavily adopted: to avoid scaring people away from using Excel. This reminds me of an observation from Richard Stallman's speech about Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html), where secretaries used Emacs Lisp to extend the editor. In a personal computing world that has a sharp distinction between "user" and "programmer," Excel is one of those exceptions where the distinction between "user" and "programmer" is blurred, since you need to use macros to take advantage of Excel's power. Excel macros are the gateway to learning Visual Basic for Applications, a full-fledged embedded programming language. Then once you know VBA, then the road to learning other programming languages such as JavaScript and Python becomes easier.
- avs733 6y ago
  because sometimes I need to deploy things that will fail gracefully with people who don't know how to code. I can setup some complex things in excel that if some one does somethign unexpected or data does something unexpected, they can just overwrite things. Code is great but requires systems that are not always in place. I would argue a formula one race car is better than a 10 year old honda. But the honda doesn't need a support crew to get me to work, can be started in an instant, and doesn't care if I forget to change the oil for a year. context matters in choosing technical solutions. Your argument is no different than all those other ones over what programming language is 'best' Excel IS a programming language.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Not only is Excel a real-time programming IDE, similar to today's "notebooks", one could also consider it "functional".
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's a reactive functional programming IDE, that existed way before the term RFP was popular. I'm serious. It's functional, as you say, and cells form a dependency DAG which drives their auto-update, which qualifies it for the "reactive" adjective.
- antihero 6y ago
  The analysts I knew at my last job would use Excel to prototype huge, incredibly complex business logic and calculations, and then have programmers (or the skilled ones would do it themselves) implement this stuff in SQL or whatever language made the most sense when it came to analysing billions of rows of real data. It's an exceptionally powerful tool for prototyping.
  - pyromine 6y ago
    I often do a fair amount of exploratory data analysis in Excel, and then take it to a BI tool or some other process to actually formalize it. In excel the ability to be sloppy is actually really nice to just sling together a few random models and call it good when I don't need to be precise.
pietromenna 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: what turned Microsoft into what it is today was not Windows at all. It was Office, and specifically Excel. It is the best of breed on the category by far. But yes, only used by those who can't code.
- mongol 6y ago
  It is used by those that can code too.
  - tetris11 6y ago
    if data.length > 1000, code it else spreadsheet
    - sosborn 6y ago
      If think it is more like, if I have to share this process with people who are non-coders, then I'm going to use excel.
      - hencq 6y ago
        Yes, or, do I want to be on point to maintain this until the end of days? If no, use Excel.
        macNchz 6y ago
        Absolutely, if you're generating any kind of ad-hoc reports for biz/marketing folks it is often a much better to implement it in a way that they understand and update than to write your own code to produce it. "Paste the export from {business system} in this tab, then drag down column F in the first tab to update the vlookups." Boom, no more 5-minutes-before-the-board-meeting-can-you-just-rerun-this-report-with-different-parameters emergencies. For the most part.
      - pietromenna 6y ago
        This is how I do it as well.
tpmx 6y ago
From a sloppy reading of the headline I first thought this was some way of making Excel (optionally) typed, sort of like moving from JavaScript to TypeScript. I wonder if this could work? It's an interesting idea, I think. I'm sure there have been attempts in the past... I guess you would be able to assign both normal units and compound units to cells (like m and m/s^2) as "formatting" and do type checking when editing a cell that references other cells.
- philsnow 6y ago
  This is exactly what I thought. The things it's bringing in don't seem like "types", they seem like "rich structured data objects, usually imported from the web, that live in cells on sheets so you can refer to in formulas". I wanted cells to have types -- not just dimensions like meters and volts but arbitrary composeable tags with a tag arithmetic, so that you can make it impossible to (or at least easy to notice when you) add "daily active users" and "monthly active users". I read a thread here on HN just a couple days ago about people whose job it is to pore through spreadsheets that drive trillions of dollars for companies and find logical errors (like the above nonsensical addition of two numbers that don't make sense), and that they save companies hundreds of millions by preventing mistakes in planning etc. Maybe I'm missing the point, but compared to real types, who cares about bringing a rich structured data object describing hydrogen into a spreadsheet?
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Yeah, pretty much. Obviously you'd need to able to create your own units, in addition to e.g. the SI system.
pupppet 6y ago
Man I can't imagine how difficult it must be bolting on new features to this ancient beast that strives for compatibility.
x87678r 6y ago
Can we get an improvement to VBA now? It hasn't changed in 20 years.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  They'll probably replace it JS, seeming as that seems to be the way forward for Office and SharePoint Add-ins, or at least it was the last time I ever looked at that stuff.
htk 6y ago
Is it just me or did anyone else find it hard to read the article with the text alternated by those large looping animated gifs?
JakeStone 6y ago
The snarky question I have is, how many of them will become confused with dates?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  A snarky follow-up question I have is, will the standard way to work around date confusion be to have all values in CSV wrapped in { ... }, or some other delimiter, to have Excel automatically convert it into structured objects which presumably won't be doing date autoguessing?
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Will the way to fix CSV be to make small adjustments or will it be to replace it with something that isn’t about the worst format ever created?
    - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
      Why is CSV the worst format?
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        The stupidest part is where it is localized so in some parts of the world the comma is the decimal separator, yet it also is the field separator. So then there’s a different field separator but there is no way to reliably detect that. CSV is full of stupid things like that. Full of magic, underspecified hacks and useless nonfeatures.
gfodor 6y ago
Wow, this totally blows up the scene. I'm sure there are gonna be haters, but Ballmercon 2021 is gonna be lit AF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
codysan 6y ago
Personally I prefer the idea of a zero-frills Excel, but this makes sense as MS needs an answer to Airtable and it's ilk.
fmakunbound 6y ago
I hope this doesn’t mean it slows down calculation or makes the UI sluggish. It’s already kind sluggish on mac.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
Periodically I find myself needing to play with some data in a lot of different ways and potentially share that data in a professional context where appearance matters. It is during those periods I start looking up all of the excel functions and features. However, if I am only occasionally looking at data and/or repeating the same operations than code + csv (or database) makes a lot more sense and gives me flexibility to deal with edge cases. I still end up opening it in excel but mostly because I already have it installed. To be honest, I would sort of like a more primitive fast csv data viewer for times when I am feeling rusty on excel and bullish on small scripts. When you are doing the data manipulation elsewhere excel is overkill. But every now and then it is a lifesaver

70 points by applecrazy 6y ago

I see alot of business use excel as a way to not engage with IT teams since they can get very far without building true systems for the their needs. So I am not sure if this is a feature that will lead to further entrenching of excel into non-enterprise applications or will enable teams to more easily disconnect from excel as the tool to do all things. I guess time will tell.

chanmad29 6y ago

Might be unpopular opinion: Excel is best with no frills and just does what it does best- simple, quick and stable. Power BI can continue to have whatever enhancements MS wants to push.

iso8859-1 6y ago

I see they use the term "Linked Data". Does it interoperate with RDF? Can I use it with Wikidata?

erhserhdfd 6y ago

Obligatory "I don't understand why people still use Excel and just don't learn to program" comment

tshanmu 6y ago
it allows more agile delivery :P
llimos 6y ago
It's those pushing programming who need to answer why it's so much better, since the Excel approach does seem to work for large numbers of people.
linguae 6y ago
I'd venture out and guess that Excel is probably the most widely used programming environment in the world. Excel macros are a type of programming language, and there are many businesses that rely on complex Excel spreadsheets as part of their operations. The fact that these are called macros and not a programming language might be a reason why they are so heavily adopted: to avoid scaring people away from using Excel. This reminds me of an observation from Richard Stallman's speech about Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html), where secretaries used Emacs Lisp to extend the editor. In a personal computing world that has a sharp distinction between "user" and "programmer," Excel is one of those exceptions where the distinction between "user" and "programmer" is blurred, since you need to use macros to take advantage of Excel's power. Excel macros are the gateway to learning Visual Basic for Applications, a full-fledged embedded programming language. Then once you know VBA, then the road to learning other programming languages such as JavaScript and Python becomes easier.
avs733 6y ago
because sometimes I need to deploy things that will fail gracefully with people who don't know how to code. I can setup some complex things in excel that if some one does somethign unexpected or data does something unexpected, they can just overwrite things. Code is great but requires systems that are not always in place. I would argue a formula one race car is better than a 10 year old honda. But the honda doesn't need a support crew to get me to work, can be started in an instant, and doesn't care if I forget to change the oil for a year. context matters in choosing technical solutions. Your argument is no different than all those other ones over what programming language is 'best' Excel IS a programming language.
Terretta 6y ago
Not only is Excel a real-time programming IDE, similar to today's "notebooks", one could also consider it "functional".
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's a reactive functional programming IDE, that existed way before the term RFP was popular. I'm serious. It's functional, as you say, and cells form a dependency DAG which drives their auto-update, which qualifies it for the "reactive" adjective.
antihero 6y ago
The analysts I knew at my last job would use Excel to prototype huge, incredibly complex business logic and calculations, and then have programmers (or the skilled ones would do it themselves) implement this stuff in SQL or whatever language made the most sense when it came to analysing billions of rows of real data. It's an exceptionally powerful tool for prototyping.
- pyromine 6y ago
  I often do a fair amount of exploratory data analysis in Excel, and then take it to a BI tool or some other process to actually formalize it. In excel the ability to be sloppy is actually really nice to just sling together a few random models and call it good when I don't need to be precise.

pietromenna 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: what turned Microsoft into what it is today was not Windows at all. It was Office, and specifically Excel. It is the best of breed on the category by far. But yes, only used by those who can't code.

mongol 6y ago
It is used by those that can code too.
- tetris11 6y ago
  if data.length > 1000, code it else spreadsheet
  - sosborn 6y ago
    If think it is more like, if I have to share this process with people who are non-coders, then I'm going to use excel.
    - hencq 6y ago
      Yes, or, do I want to be on point to maintain this until the end of days? If no, use Excel.
      - macNchz 6y ago
        Absolutely, if you're generating any kind of ad-hoc reports for biz/marketing folks it is often a much better to implement it in a way that they understand and update than to write your own code to produce it. "Paste the export from {business system} in this tab, then drag down column F in the first tab to update the vlookups." Boom, no more 5-minutes-before-the-board-meeting-can-you-just-rerun-this-report-with-different-parameters emergencies. For the most part.
    - pietromenna 6y ago
      This is how I do it as well.

tpmx 6y ago

From a sloppy reading of the headline I first thought this was some way of making Excel (optionally) typed, sort of like moving from JavaScript to TypeScript. I wonder if this could work? It's an interesting idea, I think. I'm sure there have been attempts in the past... I guess you would be able to assign both normal units and compound units to cells (like m and m/s^2) as "formatting" and do type checking when editing a cell that references other cells.

philsnow 6y ago
This is exactly what I thought. The things it's bringing in don't seem like "types", they seem like "rich structured data objects, usually imported from the web, that live in cells on sheets so you can refer to in formulas". I wanted cells to have types -- not just dimensions like meters and volts but arbitrary composeable tags with a tag arithmetic, so that you can make it impossible to (or at least easy to notice when you) add "daily active users" and "monthly active users". I read a thread here on HN just a couple days ago about people whose job it is to pore through spreadsheets that drive trillions of dollars for companies and find logical errors (like the above nonsensical addition of two numbers that don't make sense), and that they save companies hundreds of millions by preventing mistakes in planning etc. Maybe I'm missing the point, but compared to real types, who cares about bringing a rich structured data object describing hydrogen into a spreadsheet?
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah, pretty much. Obviously you'd need to able to create your own units, in addition to e.g. the SI system.

pupppet 6y ago

Man I can't imagine how difficult it must be bolting on new features to this ancient beast that strives for compatibility.

x87678r 6y ago

Can we get an improvement to VBA now? It hasn't changed in 20 years.

the_only_law 6y ago
They'll probably replace it JS, seeming as that seems to be the way forward for Office and SharePoint Add-ins, or at least it was the last time I ever looked at that stuff.

htk 6y ago

Is it just me or did anyone else find it hard to read the article with the text alternated by those large looping animated gifs?

JakeStone 6y ago

The snarky question I have is, how many of them will become confused with dates?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
A snarky follow-up question I have is, will the standard way to work around date confusion be to have all values in CSV wrapped in { ... }, or some other delimiter, to have Excel automatically convert it into structured objects which presumably won't be doing date autoguessing?
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Will the way to fix CSV be to make small adjustments or will it be to replace it with something that isn’t about the worst format ever created?
  - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    Why is CSV the worst format?
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      The stupidest part is where it is localized so in some parts of the world the comma is the decimal separator, yet it also is the field separator. So then there’s a different field separator but there is no way to reliably detect that. CSV is full of stupid things like that. Full of magic, underspecified hacks and useless nonfeatures.

gfodor 6y ago

Wow, this totally blows up the scene. I'm sure there are gonna be haters, but Ballmercon 2021 is gonna be lit AF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI

codysan 6y ago

Personally I prefer the idea of a zero-frills Excel, but this makes sense as MS needs an answer to Airtable and it's ilk.

fmakunbound 6y ago

I hope this doesn’t mean it slows down calculation or makes the UI sluggish. It’s already kind sluggish on mac.

InfiniteRand 6y ago

Periodically I find myself needing to play with some data in a lot of different ways and potentially share that data in a professional context where appearance matters. It is during those periods I start looking up all of the excel functions and features. However, if I am only occasionally looking at data and/or repeating the same operations than code + csv (or database) makes a lot more sense and gives me flexibility to deal with edge cases. I still end up opening it in excel but mostly because I already have it installed. To be honest, I would sort of like a more primitive fast csv data viewer for times when I am feeling rusty on excel and bullish on small scripts. When you are doing the data manipulation elsewhere excel is overkill. But every now and then it is a lifesaver