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Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

• kzrdude 5y ago
  Working with jupyter, I'm seriously contemplating around how to bring the best of Excel into a pandas or jupyter workflow. Mostly for exploration but also making reports, statistics, aggregations
  • nojito 5y ago
    Check out https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ It's made by the team behind rmarkdown and is easily one of the best ways to make reporting easier.
    • kzrdude 5y ago
      Sincere thanks, will read
  • __mharrison__ 5y ago
    (I'm pretty biased since I wrote a book on this, Effective Pandas.) My take is that if you embrace the limitation of chaining in Pandas it will force you to write better (easier to read, debug, deploy, share, collaborate) code. Also works for exploration, reports, stats, aggregations. (Many examples here https://store.metasnake.com/ https://store.metasnake.com/ )
    • kzrdude 5y ago
      I can't look very deeply into your link and see what the courses actually say, from here, so I'm not sure. I think you want to teach me to be better at pandas. That's fine and I learn pandas constantly, but not what I'm talking about. I want to mix in a different way of working with data, getting some of the best features of excel into the notebook workflow. I also believe that getting to know your data means reading it in a grid, not just looking at aggregations. Both are important, and with aggregations you can miss important things! Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
• maliker 5y ago
  I liked the way Apple did it in their Numbers clone of Excel - you can have multiple grids on a single page. It makes it a lot easier to have related data on the same page without fiddling with the row/column sizes to suite multiple types of data.
  • thom 5y ago
    Yep, loved using this for D&D character sheets. :)
  • etchalon 5y ago
    Numbers is deeply underrated.
    • landr0id 5y ago
      When I was in university I was working on some biology homework and didn't have Excel, but I did have Numbers! I quickly became annoyed with how smart Numbers tried to be with formatting. It knew better than me what data type some cells were and iirc it was impossible to inform it otherwise. I bought Excel after losing an hour or so of my time.
      • donut2d 5y ago
        This no longer seems to be the case. I've always found it easy to tell it what format a cell is.
    • vesinisa 5y ago
      Last time I used it I believe it just crashed when opening a large CSV file.
      • maliker 5y ago
        Also the case for me with Excel on macOS. The Windows version of Excel, on the other hand, has been a lot more performant and stable for me.
• threesmegiste 5y ago
  With python backend plus Python lib support no sofeare can beat excel
• agumonkey 5y ago
  a blend of decoupled matrices + join maybe
• chanandler_bong 5y ago
  "A spreadsheet is then the simplest, most organically natural way of organizing discrete units of information, the easiest way to perform CRUD operations on any type of data." So... you've basically answered the question here. "It’s been 40 years since the original Visicalc spreadsheet program was released, and no one has been able to beat them" There is a reason that columnar workbooks and spreadsheets have been around since humans started writing down numbers and manipulating them... it works. A "grid of cells" does exactly what it is supposed to do in the most efficient manner possible. The only "innovation" opportunities are making the underlying product suck less, or providing analytics/reporting functionality.
  • pete_nic 5y ago
    I agree. There may be no better UX alternative than columnar spreadsheets. Excel shines in scenario analysis when, for example, the data comes from your head. I believe Excel has an opportunity to improve when data comes from external sources like CSV dump from a CRM. I would like to see Excel improve the way it allows you to extract data from other systems which would reduce redundant effort and decrease the likelihood of errors.
    • chanandler_bong 5y ago
      Oh God... flashbacks to hacking ODBC connections to Access databases! ACK! But yeah, it would be cool if you could pull directly from an API in to Excel. Or directly parse JSON input without having to mangle it in jq first.
• omarhaneef 5y ago
  The key is that you can examine the state of most (not all) "intermediate" variables so not only do you know the inputs, the outputs, but also everything that happened in between in all these different ways. Your calendar app adds 2 days for tasks? You can just see the cell where it says 2 to make sure that variable is set right. Its amazing, and we are just catching up to it with "always on" variable inspectors in IDEs. Edit: That's not the only trick: cells don't have variable names but locations. You don't have to remember the type (they are all cells) or the name of a variable. Its just a location and you click on it to select it.
  • oneoff786 5y ago
    You can, however, name cells and refer to them in formulas. Much nicer to have descriptive names instead of $J$7 for constants or inputs.
• chrisgd 5y ago
  I think about this a lot. There is a need for more data-driven applications to create graphics that are more “track able” than excel. I have a series of charts that need to be sent out to multiple people (internal and external) each week. Charts, logos, tables, etc could benefit from a pipeline but without needing a data engineer. Right now, we have a standard data download from Bloomberg or another data provider, macros to change the format, access to slice, back to excel where the charts are 75% standard but might need some tweaking. Bloomberg might not classify one company as healthcare but I want to include them so access keeps a list or companies I want. That same Bloomberg output could include companies some of my colleagues would classify as tech companies so relevant for multiple people. No way to see what was done last week or changes made to the chart / table output from one person to another besides new versions of the same excel file (but still no way to see the logs) Long winded description but hopefully helps describe how important excel is but there is still room to grow.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    >No way to see what was done last week or changes made to the chart / table output from one person to another besides new versions of the same excel file (but still no way to see the logs) Why are multiple columns/pages with the various stages of the data insufficient?
  • jsmith99 5y ago
    Excel includes Power Query which is a decent ETL pipeline tool.
  • wvenable 5y ago
    Isn't this just a programming problem? Build an application that accepts the data, produces the result, and has a GUI for managing all exceptions? I've build many of these things.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Isn't this just a programming problem? What seems to be described is a UI design problem. Once the UI is designed, it also needs programmed in some form, but that doesn't seem to be the problem, just a not-particularly-interesting task required in the implementation. Not all problems that require programming are programming problems. (In fact, most are not.)
• teknopaul 5y ago
  Bettering a table for data is going to be hard. Calculated fields (instead of $L$123, $Total) could be represented in other ways to bound to cells. As could code. But honestly, with the amount of time people already waste formatting spreadsheets, less options is probably a productivity enhancement.
• snide 5y ago
  I've shifted to Airbase for pretty much anything data sheet related. The ability to have more typical data-flow joins with an easier to manage UX that teaches folks along the way is pretty phenomenal. It grows as you need, but still remains relatively simple. It's one of my favorite pieces of software from the past decade.
  • The_rationalist 5y ago
    [dead]
  • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    Do you mean Airtable?
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    Airtable is great, but it's got more of Access than Excel in its genes imho.
    • omarhaneef 5y ago
      I agree, but say more about what you mean here.
  • Closi 5y ago
    > The ability to have more typical data-flow joins This is available in Excel too - you can import data with PowerQuery, perform joins, configure relationships between multiple tables, then output that into a chart, table or pivot table. You can even put slicers on to let users interact with the data. This is entirely automatable too, so if the underlying data changes you can just run the pipeline again.
• drcongo 5y ago
  I was expecting something more than a shrug.
• taherchhabra 5y ago
  in the metaverse, you will have 3d tables, x,y and z axis, you would be able to twist and turn those 3d tables to get different views, join with other 3d tables
  • boredumb 5y ago
    Why does this need to be in the metaverse? Can't we have 3d excel sheets currently without the need for VR?
    • taherchhabra 5y ago
      the experience will be different, something like watching 3d content on a 2d screen vs watching it in oculus
  • dylan604 5y ago
    we could do that in the 80s when you hacked into the Gibson
  • anthk 5y ago
    I can do that with GNU teapot. No VR needed. Heck, you could do that even with a 486 and a terminal attached to it. https://github.com/samuelludwig/teapot https://github.com/samuelludwig/teapot GNU teapot intro from the old K.Mandla: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-like-a-pro/ https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-l...
  • indymike 5y ago
    Most spreadsheets are 3d and represent the 3rd dimension as tabs.
• olav 5y ago
  Excel is seriously killing humanity. No version control, no debugging, brittle support for automation. Excel, to me, is the single most obvious sign that we must get rid of the giant tech monopolies to re-enable innovation in software.
  • eatsyourtacos 5y ago
    >No version control Umm, put your excel file in git repo if you really need to? That's like saying C++ doesn't have version control. >no debugging Debug what exactly? If you have vb scripts, then yes you can debug. If you just have formulas.. there is literally nothing to debug. >brittle support for automation Ok, but that's also kind of the point. Excel should not be some insane thing where people do way too much. It's a spreadsheet with formulas- and that is what it's goal is. People who use excel with thousands of lines of VB code should literally be using something else 99% of the time. >Excel, to me, is the single most obvious sign that we must get rid of the giant tech monopolies to re-enable innovation in software. There is basically nothing to "innovate" related to excel. It's exactly what is needed. If you want to innovate then write your own damn spreadsheet that does some new magic you think of. Why are you trying to overcomplicate a simple 2d spreadsheet? >Excel is seriously killing humanity Excel is doing the exact opposite. You are a fool saying that- excel is so freaking simple yet so powerful. Sounds like you might live in academic lala land and have never worked at a business where there are a billion different types of things to do and simple spreadsheets can generally cover most cases.
    • throwaway889900 5y ago
      >put your excel file in git repo Binary blobs don't work very well in git repos. Perforce might be better, or so I've heard.
    • fomine3 5y ago
      * We need better history than just treat xlsx as binary. It is called SharePoint. * VBA language and debugger is obviously obsoleted. Please don't truncate values on variable pane, etc... * Aside from VBA, inspecting each expression would help debugging.
• jscode 5y ago
  Yes, Excel spreadsheets frequently contain errors that are hard to spot. Sometimes those errors end people’s careers and damage companies. Tools like Quantrix that use multi-dimensional models provide a formula syntax that’s radically less error prone while providing far superior reporting.
• rmah 5y ago
  When NeXT launched their first machine back in the late 1980's, it came with a spreadsheet 2.0 called Lotus Improv. It used what we now call pivot tables as the first class data representation. I never used it but the demos looked very cool.
• jayd16 5y ago
  If your data consists of a long complicated pipeline, there might be some useful UX coming out of shader graphs systems from computer graphics. Shaders transform data in a functional way and you can build large graphs that also clearly show the inputs and outputs of a transformation. This might be easier to debug than a spreadsheet. Any point in the pipeline can be output to a visualizer in this way. It would make debugging, understanding and inspecting the dataflow easier, but it would probably make browsing the output a bit harder so I can't say it's an obvious slam dunk. Might be interesting though.
  • pfortuny 5y ago
    I have just dabbled with Houdini and what you say (it is not exactly a shader but its procedural interface is probably similar to what you are saying) is spot-on. Lots of data incoming, a graph of operations, lots of data (and plots, and what not) outgoing.
    • jayd16 5y ago
      Yep, Houdini is another good graph/node based data transformation tool.
• SjorsVG 5y ago
  This is barely an article. It's more of a question. Not what I expected.
• narush 5y ago
  Thanks for posting! I love the topic - I've written before [1] about how I think spreadsheets are the most popular programming paradigm ever, we just don't talk about it much. I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the past 2 years building Mito [2]. Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your JupyterLab environment. You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits. Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but instead of generating scummy-crummy VBA code, it generates Python. We currently have two types of users. 1) Excel users from a huge variety of industries who are somewhere in their journey to learning Python - and Mito helps them write Python scripts quickly and make that transition easier. 2) Python users who prefer using Mito because of it's visual interface. I pretty much only use Mito when I'm trying to pivot or graph data - some things really just are better visually, especially when you get code out that you can edit if you want! We're open core [3], and also sell a Pro and Enterprise versions of the tool with advanced functionality. We've been steadily growing for the past year or so, as the product has improved (first time founder here!). Feedback greatly appreciated! [1] https://naterush.io/blog/Spreadsheets-are-the-Ultimate-Programming-Paradigm https://naterush.io/blog/Spreadsheets-are-the-Ultimate-Progr... [2] https://trymito.io https://trymito.io [3] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    I might have missed the point but the Mito demo just shows importing a CSV file into a common table/grid of cells? Seems like a semi-shamless plug that 100% avoids the topic of the post: is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?
    • narush 5y ago
      The question of "what is a better visual data model than VisiCalc" is just one of the questions we can ask ourselves about how to create Excel 2.0. In the authors original post, they point out that Notion and Coda answer this question not with an evaluation on "cells" and the data model, but rather by extending the model to include a word processor. This isn't a purely visual change, but a functionality/integration one. There are a bunch of different angles to consider the evolution of a spreadsheet, and, as I say in my response above, I personally think focuses on changes to the UI/display of data miss the point: what's missing in Excel 1.0 isn't a better display of data - IMO, it's giving the modern, powerful analysis tools that us programmers have access to the beginner-end of the programmer spectrum! Different spreadsheet startups certainly have different theses on this. Subset [1] (the OP) seems to focus on side-by-side grids on an infinite canvas. Monday [2] (also referenced by OP) seems to focus on different "views" for a spreadsheet for project tracking, etc. Mito focuses on allowing you to integrate Python and spreadsheets as easily as possible. Clay [3] seems to focus on spreadsheet integrations into APIs/other data. (Disclaimer: all the above are just my understandings of these tools, but I haven't used most of them directly mostly am just going of marketing materials... I highly recommend you check them out, though - they all look quite cool!) My post def was a plug for Mito - I'll try and make my response to the post/thesis more clearly delineated in the future. I think this post is an awesome chance to get feedback on our spreadsheet thesis (and potentially hear back from OP on this thoughts!). Rock on, spreadsheets :-) [1] https://subset.so https://subset.so [2] https://monday.com https://monday.com [3] https://www.clay.run https://www.clay.run
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  For almost all tasks, yes. But it differs a lot by task. The power of the spreadsheet model is that it is minimally acceptable for a wide array of tasks, not that it is usually optimal.
  • nealabq 5y ago
    And it is a good way to deal with lots of numbers, adding and averaging them, looking for patterns and presenting TL;DRs.
  • mromanuk 5y ago
    I think that main strength is familiarity and low learning curve. You can easily build and MVP with a spreadsheet. Understand your data, relations, patterns. The trap occurs later when you need to scale it
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I often use Excel to model data operations before I get to programming in pandas, so you're spot-on.
• nealabq 5y ago
  Spreadsheet grids are marvelous for presenting many kinds of data relevant to business. Specifically, tabular numerical data (rows of tuples with well-characterized columns). Spreadsheets are great for condensing and summarizing the minute details and aggregates spread across huge numbers of rows, and for highlighting patterns and trends. And there are other very effective ways to present data. Hypertext, Gantt charts, and pie-charts for example, which Excel also supports. But we don't use spreadsheet-grids for general programming. Programs (as we write them) are concerned with dependencies and control-flow and semi-structured hierarchies and naming lots of things. Programs are organized as a hierarchy - directories containing files containing the nested-pieces of the program, as text. And some parts of a program (state-machines, data-schemas, GUI layouts, date/control flows) are visualized as boxes containing labels with lines and arrows between them (and more labels). I'm surprised we don't have generic tools for that yet. Attempts have been made. This is not to mention geometric/photographic/aural data.
  • slaymaker1907 5y ago
    I don't think programs are necessarily a hierarchy, though that is a useful way to look at them. There are definitely mutually recursive elements, though these are admittedly limited in size of scope. However, most of the problems with looking at programs as hierarchies come from forcing elements to have a single parent containing element. Instead of a tree, you get a lot more flexibility by allowing elements to have multiple parents (so it is still a DAG, but not a tree since a path from root to the element is not necessarily unique).
    • nealabq 5y ago
      For humans, hierarchies are easier to think about and easier to format. But you're right: sometimes you really want to express your structure in a more general graph. And format it more graphically. For me the most obvious examples are: state-machines and entity-rln diagrams (and, for example, showing how your C-structs point to each other and how you're using std containers and ownership). Thanks for pointing out that what I really want is a way to create/edit a graph.
  • 5y ago
• chx 5y ago
  Tangential note. > But the data isn’t persistent enough, we only get recent commands, and the location is always moving and we can’t easily reference older calculations. You need a better shell, my friend. To quote my .zshrc HISTSIZE=100000 SAVEHIST=100000 setopt inc_append_history share_history HIST_IGNORE_DUPS bindkey '^R' history-incremental-pattern-search-backward The results? wc -l ~/.zsh_history 55576 /home/chx/.zsh_history and I can pattern search it.
• davidbarker 5y ago
  I scanned the comments to see if anyone had mentioned Causal[1] yet. I’d describe it as a spreadsheet specifically for modelling. I used it to build a cost model for the startup I work at, consisting of around 100 different inputs, and it was rather enjoyable. I was able to (reasonably easily) insert the different AWS costs for (for example) SD vs. HD video transcoding and see how that affected the costs of encoding and storing video 12 months from now. [1] https://www.causal.app/ https://www.causal.app/
  • VinLucero 5y ago
    Yeah, Causal is fantastic for financial modeling or even probability weighted forecasts. It does feel like the future. It just needs more… AirTable style functionality to be all on one like Excel.
• flakiness 5y ago
  I guess some Excel users just outgrow the app. It's time to write some code in R or Python, along side with Jupyter-like notebooks. Another option is to use more specialized tools like Tableau. The table or spread sheet is not very "visual" after all.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    Or PowerBI, VB, F# actually.
• xamde 5y ago
  Better than a grid of cells? a tree/graph of rows/grids...
• tlarkworthy 5y ago
  HTTPS://ObservableHQ.com is rows of cells where cells can be code or DOM, input widgets. Cells update themselves automatically like spreadsheets. It's is fairly insane what can done and the information content possible with these interactive notebooks that run normal JavaScript (in a non-linear fashion) https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/notebooks2021 https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/notebooks2021
• ebspelman 5y ago
  Even though current VR/AR interfaces are completely useless for Excel or other data-management tasks (no keyboard support, unreliable controls, lack of development interest), I think in the future there are more embodied / spatial treatments of data access that could feel like an improvement on '2D' Excel. As the author mentions, the original moniker for Excel was VisiCalc - a visual calculator. There's no inherent reason why 3D spatial representation would be a worse medium for a calculator.
  • anthk 5y ago
    Check Visidata.
  • slaymaker1907 5y ago
    There has been a lot of work looking into 3D visualization, but it really seems like the benefits are pretty minimal compared to the drawbacks. Even 2D visualizations seem to do better when limited to a single spatial dimension for carrying information (i.e., how pie charts are inferior bar charts in almost every way).
    • ebspelman 5y ago
      I should disclaim that I work on a 3D capture app called Polycam, but in that work I've grown used to the idea that 3D captures are inherently better at conveying some kinds of visual information than photographs are. Like a room with graffiti on the walls. The opposite is also true - 2D photos are way better at sunsets & portraits. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'd bet there are some undiscovered cases where 3D is going to be better for data representation / manipulation.
      • slaymaker1907 5y ago
        That's a great point. I had a VR headset that worked with phone a few years ago, and it was absolutely incredible how 3D still images have the ability to make you feel like you are someplace that you are not, at least compared to 2D still images and video. 3D will certainly give designers more tools to work with in making memorable visualizations which is an important feature for many visualizations.
• solarflaneur 5y ago
  Almost my entire career has been spent in companies competing against excel, made a good buck too. Not sure how I feel about that.
• AQXt 5y ago
  Excel is great for simple use cases. For complex problems, you should look at Jupyter notebooks. https://jupyter.org/ https://jupyter.org/
  • gnramires 5y ago
    I agree, I think it's a natural successor to a spreadsheet for something more complex. You can even have a section with tabular data (i.e. an embedded spreadsheet), which is what spreadsheets excel at, but it meshes very well with the classical programming paradigm.
    • _old_dude_ 5y ago
      Jupyter notebook is a regression from Excel, at least Excel computes the dependencies between the cells. With Jupyter, you have to be careful in the order you evaluate the cells. And both falls on the floor the minute you want to use a spreadsheet/notebook as a library of functions, i.e it's not composable.
• lvl102 5y ago
  Spreadsheet program with one-click data frame conversion is basically Colab + Sheets. Not sure why Google isn’t putting resources to flesh out this feature. Between Sheets, Colab/Kaggle, and Google Maps, Google should be dominating the desktop analytics space. They just need leadership with a bit more imagination. Sometimes I feel like these big techs IMPLICITLY don’t encroach on certain spaces occupied by their competitions. Shadow collusion if you will.
• InflexHQ 5y ago
  I think Excel fails when it comes to other natural types of data such as trees, graphs, even arrays or records. It’s terrible at all of them. It’s not relational, and it’s not inductive, has no sum types, or anything. What it is, is a very good UI to throw tabular data into and modify. I have a post about it here: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid
• rwhaling 5y ago
  I've been thinking about this a ton lately - I think the holy grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent in power to a Jupyter notebook. This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formulas into a logical "row", and describe row-level operations, with some kind of rough type checking or duck typing? But you might want to still retain an ability to lay out the result of computations free-form for invoice and other reporting uses that Excel is still great for? Better graphical visualization would be nice too and I think that's actually in reach - there are great open source options like vegalite and apache echarts that open up a lot of possibilities for new tools.
  • Enginerrrd 5y ago
    You know, despite being quite different than what you described, what comes close for me in concept is the Spyder IDE. They have pretty reasonable data visualization tools when you go to inspect variables. I find it really nice work in. It lets me do the real visualization and interplay between variables in code or in my head and just quickly inspect tables/vectors/rasters to sanity check as I work in real time. What's missing is the ability to then manipulate those tables and have it backfeed into the code, but I think that honestly you could again get close to that with some basic right-click>generate new column> type in python expression > translate to input into interpreter type of workflow. I also know there are some python based excel type programs.
    • bradrn 5y ago
      Despite how many flaws the language itself has, the MATLAB IDE is probably as good at this as Spyder, if not actually better.
  • antupis 5y ago
    I think holy grail is ai-assisted system where you can ask by plain English queries. Something like Wolfram alpha + gtp-3 + erp.
• SebastianKra 5y ago
  Maybe it's possible to find ways to better represent relational data? Two interesting approaches: - Ultrorg [1] attempts to represent relational databases in an excel-like format. You can build a query by editing the header of the table, and then edit the results in place. - Tableau [2][3] is a visualisation construction tool, where users can describe a graph by assigning properties to rows or columns. The result can be a table of visualisations, for example a scatterplot matrix. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGzJ8F9rC1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGzJ8F9rC1s [2]: https://www.tableau.com/products/desktop https://www.tableau.com/products/desktop [3]: it's based on Polaris https://doi.org/10.1109/2945.981851 https://doi.org/10.1109/2945.981851
  • foobiekr 5y ago
    Tableau is pretty amazing but oh lord is it painful to pick up someone’s work.
• lhh 5y ago
  I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data. It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies boil down to a spreadsheet with enforced structure to the data and codified operations performed on the data specific to the problem domain. CRMs, accounting systems, project management systems, and ordering & inventory management systems are some examples. Our product focused on financial projection & reporting (https://www.modeloptic.com/ https://www.modeloptic.com/) is another example: Excel-like functionality at the core, and since we've constrained the domain and know how different pieces of data relate to each other, we can automate away a lot of the manual labor that'd be needed in completely free-form Excel.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • InflexHQ 5y ago
    I’ve also seen that there’s a whole sub industry of companies that build a platform on top of a spreadsheet by assuming a certain structure of the data. Aside from myself, Julia’s Pluto.jl, ObservableHQ, and a few researchers, there aren’t many trying to invent a new spreadsheet replacement with a fundamentally different conceptual model.
• Devasta 5y ago
  I don't think you can improve Excel too much, but you could the ecosystem around it: Microsoft should integrate a package manager. Not something public, but something companies can privately maintain and publish packages to, that would contain common functions for their specific business. If I could have a way to download a macro to a spreadsheet that would automate database connection for certain data sets, that would be huge, and since it'd be centralized corps could even have critical sheets functions managed by version control. Mission critical excel spreadsheets run huge sections of large corps, we can discourage it or provide tools to better manage it.
  • willhslade 5y ago
    You should be able to do this with Git, Git-XL and a function to Export / Import BAS files from within Excel
  • magicalhippo 5y ago
    > I don't think you can improve Excel too much Clearly you've not used an international version of Excel. They translate all the function names, replacing the English ones, and of course not just for display. No, this gets saved in the file. So in my view, they could improve Excel an immense amount just there. Then we can talk about how it won't even obey things like an explicit "format this cell as text" command.
  • baq 5y ago
    just today found out you can't create a histogram out of a pivot table. what. i mean, i wasn't even mad. i just sat there, stared at the thing and had a suddenly empty mind slowly filling with wtfs.
  • yayr 5y ago
    there is a reason, why tools like Tableau and Power BI exist. Excel fails at building stable solutions for presenting or modeling data. Actually, it also fails at stably and effectively preparing and transforming data for more complex scenarios. It is great for freestyle. But people want to use it for more...
• odipar 5y ago
  Visual is all nice and all, but I really fancy the 'computational' model of spreadsheets which is very easy to learn and apply IMO. My latest find is the CUE language, which I believe is the first 'typed' version of a spreadsheet (in disguise). CUE is like spreadsheets, but on steroids! Here is an example: https://cuelang.org/play/?id=r4VXwbEG185#cue@export@yaml https://cuelang.org/play/?id=r4VXwbEG185#cue@export@yaml
• bezospen15 5y ago
  No. There's a reason why Excel has withstood the test of time. It will be the #1 productivity tool for decades to come
  • rawoke083600 5y ago
    I mean no insult, but I'm pretty sure that was the thinking with "the horse" as a means of transport.
• kpierce 5y ago
  Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted without validation. [Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse of original hypothesis.](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...) Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity seems to keep excel in control.
  • woah 5y ago
    I think that more precision over application of formulas would solve a lot. Arrays are mapped over by copying the code for each array element by dragging it across a row of cells, and the arguments to the formula are automatically mutated based on where the code is dragged to. This can be error prone. More concrete definitions of where a formula should apply would be good, for example, leave the formula cell in one place and specify that one argument should come from this range of cells and the other from this range of cells, and the output should be mapped to this range.
  • thrtythreeforty 5y ago
    Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB log file. I'll just use grep, or build a CSV and deal with Excel filtering. Airtable should be awesome at reducing the cost of database-ifying these random datasets to zero. But the sales constraints put it in this niche where it's not the default tool of choice.
    • oehpr 5y ago
• riidom 5y ago
  Most innovative in that space I know of, would be TreeSheets. https://strlen.com/treesheets/ https://strlen.com/treesheets/ And this software is at least 9 years old :)
  • imhoguy 5y ago
    It is just one of many mind mapping tools and it misses "calc" part. Looks like more lightweight Freemind/Freeplane.
    • riidom 5y ago
      It is a lot of things, mind mapping one of them - just as you can probably use excel for mind mapping as well (never tried that:) ) The calc part is not missing, see here: https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screenshot_sales.png https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screen... - it's more basic than what excel has.
      • InflexHQ 5y ago
        It does have limited calc, but I tend to think of it as more of an afterthought. The scripting is “very incomplete” in the words of the author, consider e.g. https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/issues/37 https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/issues/37
      • imhoguy 5y ago
        Alright, I wasn't aware about the calc feature from the front-page read impression ;)
  • sbayeta 5y ago
    Looks great. I've thought of a similar concept very fuzzily in my head.
  • KMag 5y ago
    I find https://ellx.io/ https://ellx.io/ very interesting, after chatting with its creator on HN a while ago in another next-gen spreadsheets discussion. At first glance, it's just a web-native spreadsheet where formulas and macros are both JavaScript instead of Excel formulas and VBA. However, it's clever in doing some introspection and automatic functional-reactive lifting in cases where inputs to the formulas are external time-varying inputs. You write something that looks like regular JavaScript, but if one or more of your inputs is actually a time-varying function, then the result is a time-varying function that looks like a regular JavaScript variable but is automatically updated whenever its dependencies change. So you get something like the automatic updating semantics of Excel expressions, which is very different from the semantics of regular JavaScript variables. I seem to also remember some clever introspection abilities on those time-varying functions, but it's been a while. In any case, it's obvious the creator has thought long and hard about how web-native spreadsheets should behave. It's also interesting in that you can either explicitly name the cell's result using var_name = expression or else just have a bare expression, in which case an implicit variable name is created, similar to Excel's $A$4 naming of cell results.
• mcrad 5y ago
  No power BI users?
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    Yeah, I think many haven't catched up with modern Excel experience.
• slightwinder 5y ago
  There is always something better. But the dirty little secret of spreadsheets is that they are so universal, that some way or another, you can force mostly everything somehow into the grid. The grid is the plaintext for data. It's not always the best, but usually good enough.
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  I posted this a few years ago, asking why there isn't a decent and flexible collaborative outliner like "Google Trees": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970 The thing that's missing from "Google Docs" is a decent collaborative outliner called "Google Trees", that does to "NLS" and "Frontier" what "Google Sheets" did to "VisiCalc" and "Excel". And I don't mean "Google Wave", I mean a truly collaborative extensible visually programmable spreadsheet-like outliner with expressions, constraints, absolute and relative xpath-like addressing, and scripting like Google Sheets, but with a tree instead of a grid. That eats drinks scripts and shits JSON and XML or any other structured data. Of course you should be able to link and embed outlines in spreadsheets, and spreadsheets in outlines, but "Google Maps" should also be invited to the party (along with its plus-one, "Google Mind Maps"). It should be like the collaborative outliner Douglass Englebart envisioned and implemented in his epic demo of NLS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=8m49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=8m49s Engelbart also showed how to embed lists and outlines in maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=15m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=15m39s Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and founder of UserLand Software, originally developed a wonderful outliner on the Mac originally called "ThinkTank" and then "MORE", which later evolved into the "Frontier" programming language, and ultimately the "Radio Free Userland" desktop blogging and RSS syndication tool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software More was great because it had a well designed user interface and feature set with fluid "fahrvergnügen" that made it really easy to use with the keyboard as well as the mouse. It could also render your outlines as all kinds of nicely formatted and stylized charts and presentations. And it had a lot of powerful features you usually don't see in today's generic outliners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application) >MORE is an outline processor application that was created for the Macintosh in 1986 by software developer Dave Winer and that was not ported to any other platforms. An earlier outliner, ThinkTank, was developed by Winer, his brother Peter, and Doug Baron. The outlines could be formatted with different layouts, colors, and shapes. Outline "nodes" could include pictures and graphics. >Functions in these outliners included: >Appending notes, comments, rough drafts of sentences and paragraphs under some topics >Assembling various low-level topics and creating a new topic to group them under >Deleting duplicate topics >Demoting a topic to become a subtopic under some other topic >Disassembling a grouping that does not work, parceling its subtopics out among various other topics >Dividing one topic into its component subtopics >Dragging to rearrange the order of topics >Making a hierarchical list of topics >Merging related topics >Promoting a subtopic to the level of a topic After the success of MORE, he went on to develop a scripting language whose syntax (for both code and data) was an outline. Kind of like Lisp with open/close triangles instead of parens! It had one of the most comprehensive implementation of Apple Events client and server support of any Mac application, and was really useful for automating other Mac apps, earlier and in many ways better than AppleScript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier http://frontier.userland.com/ http://frontier.userland.com/ Then XML came along, and he integrated support for XML into the outliner and programming language, and used Frontier to build "Aretha", "Manila", and "Radio Userland". http://manila.userland.com/ http://manila.userland.com/ http://radio.userland.com/ http://radio.userland.com/ He used Frontier to build a fully programmable blogging and podcasting platform, with a dynamic HTTP server, a static HTML generator, structured XML editing, RSS publication and syndication, XML-RPC client and server, OPML import and export, and much more. He basically invented and pioneered outliners, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, blogging and podcasting along the way. >UserLand's first product release of April 1989 was UserLand IPC, a developer tool for interprocess communication that was intended to evolve into a cross-platform RPC tool. In January 1992 UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier, a scripting environment for the Macintosh which included an object database and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its original release, Frontier was the only system-level scripting environment for the Macintosh, but Apple was working on its own scripting language, AppleScript, and started bundling it with the MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free, scripting language provided by Apple. >UserLand responded to Applescript by re-positioning Frontier as a Web development environment, distributing the software free of charge with the "Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996, Frontier 4.1 had become "an integrated development environment that lends itself to the creation and maintenance of Web sites and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and by the time Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was firmly established in the realms of website management and CGI scripting, allowing users to "taste the power of large-scale database publishing with free software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  pluto.jl
• d--b 5y ago
  My own take on spreadsheets2.0 is https://www.jigdev.com https://www.jigdev.com It's mostly inspired from how we use spreadsheets on wall street: a frontend for complex data applications (basically a wysiwyg interface with a DAG repl). Technically, jig is an observable notebook where the cells are spread on a canvas rather than in top/down notebook.
  • tunesmith 5y ago
    Oh hooray! I'm so glad to see more docs - I will check it out again now.
    • d--b 5y ago
      Cool! Please let know what you think/wish/like/dislike.
• DennisP 5y ago
  Ted Nelson's ZigZag might have potential, now that the patent is expired. A previous HN discussion seems like a good starting point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210008
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  How about a spreadsheet that's also an outliner? Here's an article and HN discussion about "Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets" that I posted a few years ago about shoe-horning JSON into spreadsheets so it was easier to edit and process. But ideally I'd prefer a collaborative spreadsheet that's also an outliner (which I described in another post as "Google Trees"). https://donhopkins.medium.com/representing-and-editing-json-with-spreadsheets-8f8832db5239 https://donhopkins.medium.com/representing-and-editing-json-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109798
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Like the Google Docs of TreeSheets?
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  I actually like the grid of cells. I had an epiphany: It’s just a 2D extension of 1D lines of code we use in every other programming language. I think this significantly speeds up analysis and model development. I kind of would like this same model adopted by more programming environments. 2D vs 1D lines of code. Particularly now that we have much larger, higher resolution displays.
• eob 5y ago
  I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg (https://www.ultorg.com/ https://www.ultorg.com/) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen. UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update. The result is essentially a general purpose app that can display just about any Microsoft Access UI that would been written in the 90s/2000s to provide editable views into relational data. I'm not sure if it's a domain as universal as a grid of cells, but it's a very cool app and, as a friend of Eirik's, I wish him far more visibility than he's gotten for pushing longer on this particular niche than I think most people would have.
  • dvdkon 5y ago
    This looks really neat and powerful. I think spreadsheets have a lot of deficiencies and that many users abuse them, but that's because there is no widely known alternative/extension. For example, I wanted to create a list of data sources in a particular area. It doesn't warrant any coding, this is just a simple document, but doing it in a spreadsheet is too clunky: I want tags, paragraphs of text, and, crucially, a vertical "heading-tags-link-description" structure. In the end, I wrote a Markdown doc, but now I can't sort or filter! It looks like UltOrg could deal with this, even though it's probably not one of the main usecases. I wish Eirik the best of luck with the project.
    • john61 5y ago
      try org-mode
      • dotancohen 5y ago
        Here's the org-mode tables introduction: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/tables.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/tables.html After that, google for filtering, sorting, etc. It's all possible.
    • plater 5y ago
• theonlybutlet 5y ago
  Reinventing excel is sort of like reinventing the spoke wheel. It's so fundamentally simple yet so useful.
• somat 5y ago
  For myself, I abandoned spreadsheets in favor of the relational database. In fact, I consider spreadsheets to be a phase you grow out of. Weirdly, I consider visidata to be the best spreadsheet software out there, "but visidata is not a spreadsheet" I hear you cry, I know, that is what makes it weird. I guess what I really want out of a spreadsheet is row level integrity.
• Narishma 5y ago
  Excel 2.0 already exists, no need to create it. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/2-0 https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/2-0
• akrymski 5y ago
  I think the answer depends on the use case. Spreadsheets are for general purpose compute. They are glorified calculators, and aren't meant to replace databases, even though some people seem to use them to store lists of records. Databases are for storing and accessing (linked) records. In the latter case (mostly CRUD) applications tend to have separate views for result sets (rows of records) and single records (eg amazon search results and product pages). This is a better visual data model than a grid of cells (which general purpose database access tools such as AirTable seem to insist on). I have started building something like AirTable with a 2-pane view but never finished it. Not sure if there's a business case for it, but it sure is fun to think about.
• teddyh 5y ago
  “In the days of Excel 1.0 through 4.0, most people at Microsoft thought that the most common user activity was doing financial what-if scenarios, where you do things like change the inflation rate and see how this affects your profitability. When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn’t even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything. While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a “new paradigm” spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which was going to blow away everything that existed before it. For various strange reasons, Improv was first available on the NeXT, which certainly didn’t help its sales, but a lot of smart people believed that Improv would be to NeXT as VisiCalc was to the Apple II: it would be the killer app that made people go out and buy all new hardware just to run one program. Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history. Search for it on the web, and the only links you’ll find are from very over-organized storeroom managers who have, for some reason, made a web site with an inventory of all the stuff they have collecting dust. Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright chore, if not impossible.” — Joel Spolsky, The Process of Designing a Product, 2009-05-09 <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of-designing-a-product/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of-des...>
• makecheck 5y ago
  One of the things that bugs me about spreadsheets is that they encourage people to set up very fragile unnamed things, like “the value of row X” or whatever. Then the spreadsheets become gigantic and hard to understand but the owners still swear by their data. Meanwhile in the back of my head I’m thinking: this thing could be totally wrong by now and you have not really set yourself up to see that happening.
• tunesmith 5y ago
  I think we're really close to one variant I really want. I want reactive spreadsheet, desktop, notebook/markdown. Jupyter has notebook/markdown - it has very hacky arguable support for desktop and reactive. Observable is notebook/markdown and reactive, but not desktop. Numbers.app is desktop and reactive, and the multiple tables per sheet is kinda notebooky, but is missing markdown.
• DecoPerson 5y ago
  Regarding grids of cells, it seems hard to beat. If you think of it in terms of energy, where energy is defined as some quantity you want to minimise, then it becomes apparent. Define the energy as the distance of an atom of data to other atoms of the same subject (row) plus the distance of the data to other atoms of the same abstract property (column). Then choose a model; this defines your atoms. You could call the selection of the model a discretisation because all models become 1s and 0s eventually. If you choose a model where atoms occupy pixels exclusively (only 1 atom per pixel) and the XY coordinates of each atom is the variable, I think you’ll find that feeding it into most optimisers (such as a Monte Carlo simulation) will result in something very closely resembling a grid of cells. If you choose a different 2D model/discretisation, such as hexagons, you’ll find an abstractly similar result if not a little unfamiliar. If you chose a higher dimension space for your model/discretisation (3D+), then you may find something uniquely interesting, but good luck mapping it to a solution which is compatible with our traditional 2D UIs.
• eternityforest 5y ago
  I suspect tables of objects with named fields may be slightly better for a lot of things, given the appropriate UI. It's way more structured, and doesn't rely on 2D spatial layouts that work very poorly on mobile.
• bradrn 5y ago
  For a while now I’ve been experimenting with the idea of a strongly typed spreadsheet. There is no grid model; instead computation occurs in discrete cells, where each cell can store one value, with ‘value’ defined as in programming languages to include data structures like lists and tables. Each cell gets its own type, and the formula language is type-checked before running, to allow flexible yet error-checked representation of natural data. Alas, I never was able to find a domain where this tool would be significantly better than both Excel and Jupyter… though somehow I’m still convinced that this would be a useful tool, if only I could find the right place for it.
  • InflexHQ 5y ago
    See my app for an implementation of this.
    • bradrn 5y ago
      I have in fact seen Inflex already! And I must admit to being quite surprised at seeing pretty much exactly the same UI I had imagined, already implemented. But I suspect there are still some major underlying differences between Inflex and what I’ve been doing. As a Haskeller, my emphasis has been very much on strong typing and associated language features: mine uses a Hindley–Milner variant with subtyping, allowing some information to be stored at the type level (e.g. units) and functions to be automatically broadcast to higher dimensions. The user can explicitly specify the type of each cell, allowing for more control over data modelling. Basically, I want to make a tool such that the user can create arbitrarily large spreadsheets, without running into the scalability problems of Excel etc. By contrast, Inflex seems to have a somewhat different and rather more minimal focus: simply making an easy-to-understand analogue of traditional spreadsheets which solves their biggest problems, without worrying about extraneous stuff. That being said, I will confess to not having tried Inflex all that much, so I may be misunderstanding it. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic.
      • InflexHQ 5y ago
        Inflex is statically typed, it’s pretty much PureScript with more familiar-to-Excel syntax, with row types used for records and also polymorphic variants, which aren’t in PureScript but are in OCaml. Numbers and ordering and comparisons are dealt with via type classes. You can annotate a cell’s expression with a type signature, though this is not explicitly mentioned or supported intentionally as I’m not decided fully on the syntax. Example: when you make a “table” via the Table button, it just makes a cell whose source code is: [] :: [{"column1":_, "column2":_}] as tables are just lists of records. If you go to https://inflex.io/try https://inflex.io/try (work not saved, this page doesn’t hit the DB whatsoever) you can hit Formula to write code. But all cells are code underneath (hit the triangle). My next addition to Inflex will be push-pull based FRP, for dealing with time, buttons and external events and outputs. I also plan on having it scale so that cells with large tables are refined into real database rows for more efficient operations. So the goal of Inflex is to embrace the small scale (lists and easy spreadsheet stuff) with a smooth migration path towards more advanced programming, in a coherent whole. But you have to start with the simple and work your way to the fancy stuff, or so I think. I’ve considered units of measure, but they are complicated from an end-user perspective and complicate the type system, I’m not sure whether they’re worth it over providing very good automated property based testing. That’s an ongoing consideration. Development is slow in my spare time which is limited, but I’m comfortable going at my own pace. I’d like to roll out a discourse forum to document things, but hosting is quite expensive. It’s worth resolving this, though, because I’m doing a poor job at explaining the product. One is always choosing between adding more polish/features and documenting!
• smackeyacky 5y ago
  I did have a sort-kinda Excel replacement idea that I have half implemented, but it was based on distributed data sitting in OneDrive/DropBox/Google Drive etc. with formulas in a derived macro language that looked like Excel but worked like SQL. It's built around Roslyn to do the evaluations. I did it that way because I wanted the flexibility of being able to run high-level style, predefined macros based around Excel, but with the ability to drop down to scripted C# if necessary. It was a classic case of overkill. I need a way to do custom data extraction without re-writing the extract every time somebody made a new request. Some of the data had to be supplied by the client. I ended up with a monstrous, hash-based quasi database that runs inside an AWS Lambda. I only half finished it because it does what I want at the moment (custom data exports for customers) but after I had it working I thought it was so stupid powerful I had to pause. The main problem I see with something that is entirely distributed, but programmable at the C# level means it's also incredibly unsafe for anybody who is hosting it. It would need a lot more work to be interactive (batch oriented for safety at the moment) but as an idea it seems like the next logical step from Google Sheets / Excel with a short learning curve for Excel jockeys. Roslyn is an astonishing piece of tech really. The ability to precompile statements and call them by passing arguments is bonkers, I haven't played with anything like it since being a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s.
• __mharrison__ 5y ago
  The problem (and the reason for the success) with Excel is that it optimized for ease of use. The five minute out of the box experience is wonderful. However once you start "coding" (and I'll argue that if you using a vlookup or "if" function, you are programming with Excel) it is horrible. Ignores all of the best practices we have learned over the past 60 years for programming (modular, documentation, testing, source control, profiling). I'm obviously biased given that I teach Python and Data Science. But I think you should optimize towards writing readable code. (From my experience teaching Pandas to thousands of students and seeing it in the wild, most people are using it wrong as well). (It just so happens that I spent most of the day deep-diving into Excel and how to most effectively cross over to a proper programming paradigm...)
• kesor 5y ago
  This? https://youtu.be/YDvbDiJZpy0 https://youtu.be/YDvbDiJZpy0 - TED: Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet | Dan Bricklin
• riskneutral 5y ago
  I am deeply interested in this problem space. If someone else reading this is as equally interested and would like to collaborate, let me know!
• tony-allan 5y ago
  My thought experiment is to jump into a helicopter and have a look at what people and organisations are trying to achieve. The data in a spreadsheet is not isolated. It comes from somewhere and is usually going somewhere when the work is done (as more data or a decision). Is may even be a real-time flow of data. If we had a system where data was coming from one or more sources (big data), and then in a process, filtered, combined, cleaned, analysed, reviewed, graphed) then I can imaging a series of tools with a spreadsheet like UI and data flowing between them in an orchestrated way. Although each tool has a familiar spreadsheet UI, some might, for example, allow data to be filtered but not modified. A group of people could use this system to achieve some business goal. After an organisation's data sources are hooked up, then any power users could create flowchart like processes and select which tool to use in each step and then invite others to participate. In a real system you would expect a real-time flow of data with each intermediate tool automatically updated as new data arrives and then flow onward after a human intervention was made or perhaps just an automated step. Anyone with access could jump in and get a feed from any point in the system and do their own work with the data. There might also be some scripts in your favourite language to do additional processing along the way. What do we leave out: - error prone copy/paste - the ability to clobber data or formula's in unexpected places.
  • tony-allan 5y ago
    Here is a notebook version of what I was thinking... https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/
• Yan-solucracy 5y ago
• asavinov 5y ago
  One idea is to use columns instead of cells. Each column has a definition in terms of other columns which might also be defined in terms of other columns. If you change value(s) in some source column then these changes will propagate through the graph of these column definitions. Some fragments of this general idea were implemented in different systems, for example, Power BI or Airtable. The main difficulty in any formalization is how to deal with columns in multiple tables. This approach was formalized in the concept-oriented model of data which relies on two basic elements: mathematical functions and mathematical sets. In contrast, most traditional data models rely on only sets. Functions are implemented as columns. This model gets rid of joins and groupby by making data processing simpler and more intuitive. This approach was implemented in the Prosto data processing toolkit: https://github.com/asavinov/prosto https://github.com/asavinov/prosto
• Qem 5y ago
  Some thoughts of Alan Kay on spreadsheets: https://docs.huihoo.com/smalltalk/Computer-Software.pdf https://docs.huihoo.com/smalltalk/Computer-Software.pdf