I completely agree with your assessment of why spreadsheets fail. Completely unstructured data plus a mixture of exploration and analysis is a recipe for disast

I completely agree with your assessment of why spreadsheets fail. Completely unstructured data plus a mixture of exploration and analysis is a recipe for disaster. > These complexities arise because Excel is super un-opinionated about what types of analyses make sense for a spreadsheet and how those analyses should be structured. Because Mito is designed specifically for working with tabular data through pandas dataframes, we're able to make design decisions that enforce a bit more structure into the analysis. 1) All data in Mito must be tabular -- it both preserves the structure of the spreadsheet and fits the ideals of pandas dataframes. 2) Every edit you apply in Mito applies the entire column (or dataframe for ops like filter, sort, pivot, etc.). I tend to agree with this too, though there are cases where either (1) or (2) may need to be relaxed. Personally, I think static type checking will also turn out to be useful for structure enforcement: it’s nice to have things like builtin support for units, or defining enumerations for categorical data, or even just making sure that each column has the same type of data throughout. (This is also why I’m uncomfortable with building a spreadsheet on Python, for all the advantages such an approach has.) > In practice, we see complexity explosion is the result of combining data exploration and analysis. In the exploration phase users apply temporary filters, column transformations, etc. But they don't want to take those transformations with them. What is exploratory and analysis work is often not known until after the analysis, so its a hard problem to design for, but its something we spend a lot of time talking about. Making a UI good for both data exploration as well as more in-depth analysis is an interesting problem, and I’m not convinced we’ve found a good solution yet. Spreadsheets are good for the former, but not for the latter; programming is good for the latter, but not the former. Inserting a spreadsheet into a notebook interface seems a reasonable compromise, but I’m sure it’s possible to find something better and more tightly integrated. > Lastly, I'd love to engage with you more about this Sure, thanks! I’ll send you an email now.