8 ms·

Lambdas as values in Excel

126 points by occamrazor 5y ago

occamrazor 5y ago
Excel now has MAP, REDUCE and other helper functions for functional programming. See also https://insider.office.com/en-gb/blog/new-lambda-functions-available-in-excel https://insider.office.com/en-gb/blog/new-lambda-functions-a...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  And an F# like language, Power Query.
  - bradrn 5y ago
    I haven’t heard of this before. Do you happen to have any more details? EDIT: Found it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/. But it doesn’t look particularly F#-like — Power Query seems more focused around, well, querying data.
    - vhhn 5y ago
      I think parent comment was referring to the M-code [0] [0](https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/ https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/)
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yep that was it.
      - bradrn 5y ago
        Ah, thanks!
  - snthpy 5y ago
    I really like the M Language and Power Query (PQ) makes it really easy and convenient to build data mashups. You can even use it as a SQL query builder by viewing the Native Query code and then copying that. The main issue I'm facing is how to distribute the library of PQ/M functions I've developed? Currently I have a central library workbook and then have to copy code from there. Problem is that updates and bugfixes don't flow downstream. I really hope Microsoft creates a solution for this. Would love to hear about some approaches for handling this in the meantime.
    - cosmie 5y ago
      There are a few third party libraries/projects that are useful for that situation. Libpq[1] is one, and this[2] project is another. The readme for that second one includes links to several other M/PQ related projects. [1] https://libpq.ml/ https://libpq.ml/ [2] https://github.com/KiaraGrouwstra/pquery https://github.com/KiaraGrouwstra/pquery
Aisen8010 5y ago
They could have used some notation to separate the arguments from the function body. The arrow => would be a good candidate.
- harperlee 5y ago
  It would be an awful option, think of the diversity of excel users. Millions of them would struggle to understand that here, this time, that does not represent “equal or greater”, and it would be an endless source of confusion.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    More importantly, regularity is nice, and Excel already has no syntactic delineation between functions and special forms e.g. IF will only evaluate the expression matching the condition (though AND and OR are somewhat unexpectedly eager).
  - hencq 5y ago
    You're right of course, but I secretly dream they would just change the syntax to straight up s-expressions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
queuebert 5y ago
Congratulations, Microsoft. Welcome to 1958.
mcbishop 5y ago
I'm very excited about Lambda functions. Create your own set of clean logical functions on top of quirkier default functions. Optionally with namespacing (e.g. "m." for math functions / "t." for text functions). Use recursion in the function definition, without external programming.
blululu 5y ago
I feel like this feature was built because the engineering team spends too much time reading functional programming/ML zeal here on hacker news instead of a real user/customer desire. The irony is that this feature will almost certainly be met with derision/scorn from the CS crowd and clueless shrugs from excel users.
- mcbishop 5y ago
  > this feature will almost certainly be met with derision/scorn from the CS crowd Why?
- blast 5y ago
  SPJ was the driving force behind the feature: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e..., so I don't think that is true.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > clueless shrugs from excel users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4y5UqauRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4y5UqauRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s6Dni1dG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s6Dni1dG8 Demonstrably false. What has instead happened, I shit you not, is we have "Excel influencers" teaching people recursion "without code!" (aka without VBScript). I cried and I laughed when I first saw, it was a watershed moment in CS education.
- MikusR 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw
wombatpm 5y ago
So new functions in the spreadsheets instead writing those functions in VBA? If VBA was too hard, Microsoft thinks that functional programming will go down easier?
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  This lets you more easily reuse excel formulas (within a spreadsheet) without enabling VBA or extension modules, which is a big boon from a security standpoint. Given the existing wonkiness of the excel formula programming model, anyone who already had a grasp of actual tables and array formulas (which to be fair, is already a small subset of excel formula users) will be able to pick up these pretty easily.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Why not? VBA is confusing and outdated. If they ported macros to JS I think a lot more people would be comfortable with it. In the same vein being able to stay in Excel's formula language instead of teaching yourself VBA seems a lot more tenable for formula gods who haven't quite figured out imperative programming outside of Excel yet.
  - resoluteteeth 5y ago
    Js is already supposed to be the preferred way to make addins now since it's the only way to make them work in both the desktop and web version. There's just no built in editor.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  VBA was "too powerful" in 2 ways. Primarily it was a security risk, it had way too much capability beyond implementing custom functions on spreadsheet data. Secondarily it was too decoupled from the spreadsheet, an programming environment bolted on top of the spreadsheet, while lambdas are much smaller in scope targeted specifically at just reusable spreadsheet functions.
curiousgal 5y ago
Meanwhile hitting Ctrl-A in any text field doesn't do anything. Single quotes don't work in formulas and the list goes on...
dlojudice 5y ago
for a moment I thought it would now be possible to call a serverless lambda function with excel being the runtime. I've been through scenarios where sophisticated calculations were done in excel by domain experts and then it was necessary to translate them into code by developers, so having an excel-as-a-service would be great.
- cosmie 5y ago
  If you're in the Office 365 ecosystem, you can do just that (in a sense). The MS Graph API has a workbook endpoint[1] that lets you do nifty stuff with Excel workbooks hosted in OneDrive or Sharepoint. Pair that with non-persistent sessions[2], and you basically get an Excel workbook as a serverless runtime environment. If you structure the workbook with this type of use in mind, it works really handily. Create a non-persistent session, updated named items with the input values, run an explicit calculate on the workbook, and grab whatever result you're after (a table, named range, pivottable, chart graphics, etc), close the workbook session (or let it expire). If you need to keep the data around for historical reasons, you can follow the same process but copy the template workbook and create a persistent session against the copy, so the inputs/outputs are saved. You can also leverage Power Automate[3] (Microsoft's version of Zapier) to create an actual serverless function for your specific workflow that can accept your inputs, call the appropriate Graph endpoints for those steps, and return the output. Although the licensing gets funky, most people with an Office 365 license have some level of usage included already. It's definitely not a solution architecture you want to use for anything mission-critical or high-volume, but it's super handy for anything that's going to be Excel based anyway and you'd like to minimize the surface area for human error during the process. Also nifty for situations where a process/scenario/PoC is still being matured and developed in Excel, but you need to use it for production use cases. Create a stable input/output interface with a Power Automate workflow (or other serverless interface) that consumers can work against, then continue your Excel-based process development without disrupting them. At some point when it's stable/mature, port it over to code that maintains that same input/output structure and cut over the downstream consumers to the new endpoint. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/workbook-createsession https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/workbook-createse... [3] https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/
thebiss 5y ago
The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. I wish they made these an add-on. Until then, I expect to hear my fancy files are "broken."
- omh 5y ago
  Quite a lot of organisations are now running Office 365. It gets updated monthly with new features as well as security updates. Even more conservative organisations will often be running Office 365 with a lag, still getting features after ~6 months. If you need 100% compatibility that will always take a while, and I'm sure some big enterprises are on old style office. But it seems like the vast majority of small/medium business is on the Office 365 juggernaut now.
  - signal11 5y ago
    True. And a few large organisations are taking those baby steps too. Some of these super-conservative organisations started using subscription software with Adobe’s creative cloud, and got familiar with monthly update schedules thanks to Windows and RHEL patching. They are slowly coming around to accepting that Word and Excel can be deployed and patched just like the OS, and paid for like Photoshop, or used online along with things like Teams and OneDrive inside the organisation.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. Also seems difficult to maintain if these are cell-bound, and both the cell edition interface and the Name Manager interface were an incredibly poor edition experience from what I remember, but maybe that improved since?
  - occamrazor 5y ago
    There is a new and better Name Manager in the Mac version.
thewakalix 5y ago
> You could author one function for each value which checks the condition but this is error prone and requires a lot of duplication for something pretty basic. For reference, the duplicated formulas might look like this (with one formula for each value): =AND(A2>50, A2<80) =AND(A3>50, A2<80) ... Appropriately enough, the second line contains a copy-and-paste error!
- mayoff 5y ago
  Realistically you'd just drag the fill handle rather than using copy/paste/edit, so you'd be unlikely to find this bug in a real worksheet.
  - Karellen 5y ago
    http://www.eusprig.org/basic-research.htm http://www.eusprig.org/basic-research.htm > There is a very extensive research base on the risks of using spreadsheets within business see [Panko, 2000] [Panko & Ordway, 2005] [Powell, Baker & Lawson, 2007]. Much of the research has been coordinated and progressed by EuSpRIG [Chadwick, 2003]. Further significant work improving the end user approach to software has been undertaken by the EUSES consortium [EUSES, 2009]. > The main known risks of spreadsheets include: > a) Human Error – To err is human, hence the majority (>90%) of spreadsheets contain errors. Because spreadsheets are rarely tested [Panko, 2006] [Pryor, 2004] these errors remain. Recent research has shown that about 50% of spreadsheet models used operationally in large businesses have material defects [Powell, Baker, Lawson, 2007] [Croll, 2008]. Approximately 50% of executives recently surveyed had encountered spreadsheet related problems up to and including staff dismissal [Caulkins, Morrison & Weideman, 2007].
  - beerandt 5y ago
    But that's a problem in itself that's always bothered me: dragging works slightly different than copy/paste works different than cut/paste. And the different uses are useful on their own, but the inconsistency makes understanding how to manipulate formulas in simple ways overly confusing, especially when first learning the behavior. The ability copy-and-paste-absolute and to cut-and-paste-relative should be right there next to cut copy and paste when you right click, and should have been there decades ago.
maliker 5y ago
I gotta admit, Microsoft is pushing out some cool features that are widely accessible. I've been enjoying the Github Actions feature, Teams is actually getting my organization to stop using Sharepoint, VSCode is great, and now Excel is getting some nice function upgrades. We've come a long way from the 90s embrace-extend-extinguish MS business strategy (or are at least enjoying a period of embrace+extend).
- bob1029 5y ago
  Agreed - Teams causes me some pain, but it is something we are getting used to now. Let's also not forget about the current state of the .NET ecosystem. C#9+ on top of .NET 5+ is an amazing developer experience. Being able to contribute to the framework via any authenticated GitHub account is nice too. I find myself almost accidentally participating in Microsoft's issue threads simply because it is so easy to do so.
- plussed_reader 5y ago
  Disagree about the progress; See Winget. Classic bungling.
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    Can you elaborate how on why you think Winget is being bungled?
  - meibo 5y ago
    Microsoft has 181,000 full-time employees. There's probably quite a few teams in that company that never have anything to do with each other.
  - maliker 5y ago
    It’s definitely not as good as Chocolatey, but they realized there’s a need, and it’s a start.
- vondur 5y ago
  I think Teams creates a SharePoint site for each Team that is created. Kinda funny really.
louthy 5y ago
Now, if they’d just do that for T-SQL I’d be very happy!
ttul 5y ago
Your move, Google Sheets.
avodonosov 5y ago
Y combinator possible?
jayd16 5y ago
Greenspun's tenth rule at work?
arsenide 5y ago
This is really neat. As someone using Excel to do slot game mathematics calculations, sometimes the excel formulas used are very long, convoluted, and hard to grok when coming back to them. Many cells often exist as calculation cells only, used for intermediate steps which leads to even more logic complexity. I’m excited to experiment with these to try and simplify some of the long, previously-deemed-necessary calculation methods.
timwis 5y ago
Anyone know if this is possible in Google sheets? Also, one thing I always find challenging when applying formulas to a column is applying it to the entire column. Either you remember to copy and paste it when you add a new row, or you drag it down to row 10000 and then have a bunch of formula errors because your data doesn’t have that many rows. Or add if(empty()) prefixes which makes them much harder to read. Any better way around that?

126 points by occamrazor 5y ago

Excel now has MAP, REDUCE and other helper functions for functional programming. See also https://insider.office.com/en-gb/blog/new-lambda-functions-available-in-excel https://insider.office.com/en-gb/blog/new-lambda-functions-a...

pjmlp 5y ago
And an F# like language, Power Query.
- bradrn 5y ago
  I haven’t heard of this before. Do you happen to have any more details? EDIT: Found it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/. But it doesn’t look particularly F#-like — Power Query seems more focused around, well, querying data.
  - vhhn 5y ago
    I think parent comment was referring to the M-code [0] [0](https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/ https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/)
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Yep that was it.
    - bradrn 5y ago
      Ah, thanks!
- snthpy 5y ago
  I really like the M Language and Power Query (PQ) makes it really easy and convenient to build data mashups. You can even use it as a SQL query builder by viewing the Native Query code and then copying that. The main issue I'm facing is how to distribute the library of PQ/M functions I've developed? Currently I have a central library workbook and then have to copy code from there. Problem is that updates and bugfixes don't flow downstream. I really hope Microsoft creates a solution for this. Would love to hear about some approaches for handling this in the meantime.
  - cosmie 5y ago
    There are a few third party libraries/projects that are useful for that situation. Libpq[1] is one, and this[2] project is another. The readme for that second one includes links to several other M/PQ related projects. [1] https://libpq.ml/ https://libpq.ml/ [2] https://github.com/KiaraGrouwstra/pquery https://github.com/KiaraGrouwstra/pquery

Aisen8010 5y ago

They could have used some notation to separate the arguments from the function body. The arrow => would be a good candidate.

harperlee 5y ago
It would be an awful option, think of the diversity of excel users. Millions of them would struggle to understand that here, this time, that does not represent “equal or greater”, and it would be an endless source of confusion.
- masklinn 5y ago
  More importantly, regularity is nice, and Excel already has no syntactic delineation between functions and special forms e.g. IF will only evaluate the expression matching the condition (though AND and OR are somewhat unexpectedly eager).
- hencq 5y ago
  You're right of course, but I secretly dream they would just change the syntax to straight up s-expressions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

queuebert 5y ago

Congratulations, Microsoft. Welcome to 1958.

mcbishop 5y ago

I'm very excited about Lambda functions. Create your own set of clean logical functions on top of quirkier default functions. Optionally with namespacing (e.g. "m." for math functions / "t." for text functions). Use recursion in the function definition, without external programming.

blululu 5y ago

I feel like this feature was built because the engineering team spends too much time reading functional programming/ML zeal here on hacker news instead of a real user/customer desire. The irony is that this feature will almost certainly be met with derision/scorn from the CS crowd and clueless shrugs from excel users.

mcbishop 5y ago
> this feature will almost certainly be met with derision/scorn from the CS crowd Why?
blast 5y ago
SPJ was the driving force behind the feature: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e..., so I don't think that is true.
Ericson2314 5y ago
> clueless shrugs from excel users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4y5UqauRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4y5UqauRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s6Dni1dG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s6Dni1dG8 Demonstrably false. What has instead happened, I shit you not, is we have "Excel influencers" teaching people recursion "without code!" (aka without VBScript). I cried and I laughed when I first saw, it was a watershed moment in CS education.
MikusR 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

wombatpm 5y ago

So new functions in the spreadsheets instead writing those functions in VBA? If VBA was too hard, Microsoft thinks that functional programming will go down easier?

icegreentea2 5y ago
This lets you more easily reuse excel formulas (within a spreadsheet) without enabling VBA or extension modules, which is a big boon from a security standpoint. Given the existing wonkiness of the excel formula programming model, anyone who already had a grasp of actual tables and array formulas (which to be fair, is already a small subset of excel formula users) will be able to pick up these pretty easily.
nexuist 5y ago
Why not? VBA is confusing and outdated. If they ported macros to JS I think a lot more people would be comfortable with it. In the same vein being able to stay in Excel's formula language instead of teaching yourself VBA seems a lot more tenable for formula gods who haven't quite figured out imperative programming outside of Excel yet.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Js is already supposed to be the preferred way to make addins now since it's the only way to make them work in both the desktop and web version. There's just no built in editor.
zamadatix 5y ago
VBA was "too powerful" in 2 ways. Primarily it was a security risk, it had way too much capability beyond implementing custom functions on spreadsheet data. Secondarily it was too decoupled from the spreadsheet, an programming environment bolted on top of the spreadsheet, while lambdas are much smaller in scope targeted specifically at just reusable spreadsheet functions.

curiousgal 5y ago

Meanwhile hitting Ctrl-A in any text field doesn't do anything. Single quotes don't work in formulas and the list goes on...

dlojudice 5y ago

for a moment I thought it would now be possible to call a serverless lambda function with excel being the runtime. I've been through scenarios where sophisticated calculations were done in excel by domain experts and then it was necessary to translate them into code by developers, so having an excel-as-a-service would be great.

cosmie 5y ago
If you're in the Office 365 ecosystem, you can do just that (in a sense). The MS Graph API has a workbook endpoint[1] that lets you do nifty stuff with Excel workbooks hosted in OneDrive or Sharepoint. Pair that with non-persistent sessions[2], and you basically get an Excel workbook as a serverless runtime environment. If you structure the workbook with this type of use in mind, it works really handily. Create a non-persistent session, updated named items with the input values, run an explicit calculate on the workbook, and grab whatever result you're after (a table, named range, pivottable, chart graphics, etc), close the workbook session (or let it expire). If you need to keep the data around for historical reasons, you can follow the same process but copy the template workbook and create a persistent session against the copy, so the inputs/outputs are saved. You can also leverage Power Automate[3] (Microsoft's version of Zapier) to create an actual serverless function for your specific workflow that can accept your inputs, call the appropriate Graph endpoints for those steps, and return the output. Although the licensing gets funky, most people with an Office 365 license have some level of usage included already. It's definitely not a solution architecture you want to use for anything mission-critical or high-volume, but it's super handy for anything that's going to be Excel based anyway and you'd like to minimize the surface area for human error during the process. Also nifty for situations where a process/scenario/PoC is still being matured and developed in Excel, but you need to use it for production use cases. Create a stable input/output interface with a Power Automate workflow (or other serverless interface) that consumers can work against, then continue your Excel-based process development without disrupting them. At some point when it's stable/mature, port it over to code that maintains that same input/output structure and cut over the downstream consumers to the new endpoint. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/workbook-createsession https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/workbook-createse... [3] https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/

thebiss 5y ago

The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. I wish they made these an add-on. Until then, I expect to hear my fancy files are "broken."

omh 5y ago
Quite a lot of organisations are now running Office 365. It gets updated monthly with new features as well as security updates. Even more conservative organisations will often be running Office 365 with a lag, still getting features after ~6 months. If you need 100% compatibility that will always take a while, and I'm sure some big enterprises are on old style office. But it seems like the vast majority of small/medium business is on the Office 365 juggernaut now.
- signal11 5y ago
  True. And a few large organisations are taking those baby steps too. Some of these super-conservative organisations started using subscription software with Adobe’s creative cloud, and got familiar with monthly update schedules thanks to Windows and RHEL patching. They are slowly coming around to accepting that Word and Excel can be deployed and patched just like the OS, and paid for like Photoshop, or used online along with things like Teams and OneDrive inside the organisation.
masklinn 5y ago
> The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. Also seems difficult to maintain if these are cell-bound, and both the cell edition interface and the Name Manager interface were an incredibly poor edition experience from what I remember, but maybe that improved since?
- occamrazor 5y ago
  There is a new and better Name Manager in the Mac version.

thewakalix 5y ago

> You could author one function for each value which checks the condition but this is error prone and requires a lot of duplication for something pretty basic. For reference, the duplicated formulas might look like this (with one formula for each value): =AND(A2>50, A2<80) =AND(A3>50, A2<80) ... Appropriately enough, the second line contains a copy-and-paste error!

mayoff 5y ago
Realistically you'd just drag the fill handle rather than using copy/paste/edit, so you'd be unlikely to find this bug in a real worksheet.
- Karellen 5y ago
  http://www.eusprig.org/basic-research.htm http://www.eusprig.org/basic-research.htm > There is a very extensive research base on the risks of using spreadsheets within business see [Panko, 2000] [Panko & Ordway, 2005] [Powell, Baker & Lawson, 2007]. Much of the research has been coordinated and progressed by EuSpRIG [Chadwick, 2003]. Further significant work improving the end user approach to software has been undertaken by the EUSES consortium [EUSES, 2009]. > The main known risks of spreadsheets include: > a) Human Error – To err is human, hence the majority (>90%) of spreadsheets contain errors. Because spreadsheets are rarely tested [Panko, 2006] [Pryor, 2004] these errors remain. Recent research has shown that about 50% of spreadsheet models used operationally in large businesses have material defects [Powell, Baker, Lawson, 2007] [Croll, 2008]. Approximately 50% of executives recently surveyed had encountered spreadsheet related problems up to and including staff dismissal [Caulkins, Morrison & Weideman, 2007].
- beerandt 5y ago
  But that's a problem in itself that's always bothered me: dragging works slightly different than copy/paste works different than cut/paste. And the different uses are useful on their own, but the inconsistency makes understanding how to manipulate formulas in simple ways overly confusing, especially when first learning the behavior. The ability copy-and-paste-absolute and to cut-and-paste-relative should be right there next to cut copy and paste when you right click, and should have been there decades ago.

maliker 5y ago

I gotta admit, Microsoft is pushing out some cool features that are widely accessible. I've been enjoying the Github Actions feature, Teams is actually getting my organization to stop using Sharepoint, VSCode is great, and now Excel is getting some nice function upgrades. We've come a long way from the 90s embrace-extend-extinguish MS business strategy (or are at least enjoying a period of embrace+extend).

bob1029 5y ago
Agreed - Teams causes me some pain, but it is something we are getting used to now. Let's also not forget about the current state of the .NET ecosystem. C#9+ on top of .NET 5+ is an amazing developer experience. Being able to contribute to the framework via any authenticated GitHub account is nice too. I find myself almost accidentally participating in Microsoft's issue threads simply because it is so easy to do so.
plussed_reader 5y ago
Disagree about the progress; See Winget. Classic bungling.
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  Can you elaborate how on why you think Winget is being bungled?
- meibo 5y ago
  Microsoft has 181,000 full-time employees. There's probably quite a few teams in that company that never have anything to do with each other.
- maliker 5y ago
  It’s definitely not as good as Chocolatey, but they realized there’s a need, and it’s a start.
vondur 5y ago
I think Teams creates a SharePoint site for each Team that is created. Kinda funny really.

louthy 5y ago

Now, if they’d just do that for T-SQL I’d be very happy!

ttul 5y ago

Your move, Google Sheets.

avodonosov 5y ago

Y combinator possible?

jayd16 5y ago

Greenspun's tenth rule at work?

arsenide 5y ago

This is really neat. As someone using Excel to do slot game mathematics calculations, sometimes the excel formulas used are very long, convoluted, and hard to grok when coming back to them. Many cells often exist as calculation cells only, used for intermediate steps which leads to even more logic complexity. I’m excited to experiment with these to try and simplify some of the long, previously-deemed-necessary calculation methods.

timwis 5y ago

Anyone know if this is possible in Google sheets? Also, one thing I always find challenging when applying formulas to a column is applying it to the entire column. Either you remember to copy and paste it when you add a new row, or you drag it down to row 10000 and then have a bunch of formula errors because your data doesn’t have that many rows. Or add if(empty()) prefixes which makes them much harder to read. Any better way around that?