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The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use
by ttul 6y ago
The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT, RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can’t fathom why Excel hasn’t yet introduced regular expressions.
- cdolan 6y agoAgreed. I would love to leverage REGEX! Excel formulas have long been too hard to comprehend if you were not the original author... and even if you did author it, 4 weeks later you won’t remember how it worked without a half hour of review!
- chaz6 6y agoWhilst not native, you can emulate these with a user defined function (UDF).
- cm2187 6y agoGiven the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as they hear “regex” (including me), I am not sure regex will bring much to regular users. If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users. (And if you really want regex, there are hundreds of results on google on how to build your own VBA UDF to get it).
- aidos 6y agoThere’s nothing wrong with a small extract or substitute regex, in my opinion.
- craftinator 6y ago> Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as they hear “regex” > If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users. What are you talking about? Regular expressions are used everywhere. On the backend it's text parsing, on the front end it's input validation. I have never written a complete application without using it. You're also the first person I've heard grumble about them. I get that if regex is used in an overly convoluted or messy fashion, they become unreadable and unreliable. Just like assignment operators, nested division, or any other basic programming construct. But they are also remarkably powerful at solving simple pattern matching in a robust way. I recommend you go learn them instead of making baseless claims about "the number of developers who spit on the floor" when talking about them or whatever.
- kaishiro 6y agoJust to throw another anecdote on top of yours, I've never worked in a shop where they weren't grumbled about from time to time - so I personally don't find the parent's claim to be baseless at all. Many developers struggle with the "language" of regex - and no matter how many times I "learn it", it doesn't change the fact that I have to pull up references every time I'm building out an expression. Grandparents post re: Excel had me curious actually - because I (personally) find the use of Left, Mid, Right, etc generally far more logical and readable than trying to parse a regex string.
- bombcar 6y agoEvery time I have to use Regex I muddle through various tutorials and try stuff until it seems to work. A horrible but practical way to use them. Being able to describe them in an Excel-like fashion and have it spit out a working Regex would be nice.
- somurzakov 6y agosame developers don't like SQL because it's complicated (or rather they don't understand it) and end up using an ORM mess. yes still SQL is everywhere
- cm2187 6y agoI was under the impression the primary use for ORM isn't because SQL is complicated (it really is not) but rather because it is embedded in strings and therefore un-testable and opaque to the compiler. And the complexity of SQL to someone who already codes is marginal. Here in Excel we are talking about the complexity to someone with no coding experience.
- samatman 6y agoThe motive behind ORM is in the name: it is to Map Objects to Relations. The promise is that a Java (then Ruby) developer, could simply design the objects needed for the program, and the fields which need to be persistent could be automatically mapped to the database using ORM. The reality is quite different of course, there's a reason ORM is so widely derided. But ORM is more about skipping the bookkeeping involved in setting up persistence for application code, rather than testability or opacity of SQL.
- Spooky23 6y agoIts much easier than the legacy garbage that many office users are stuck with. My guess in my organization (huge, 100k people) we probably have ~50 FTEs who do stupid work solely because of this feature not existing.