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Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me
by mckn1ght 3y ago
Brilliant idea/URL.
It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level.
I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.
- 77pt77 3y ago[flagged]
- topherclay 3y agoomg you can't just ask someone if they are Japanese.
- 77pt77 3y agoWork trope in Japan is that everything is done in excel. Even when it makes no sense. You even have artists doing painting in excel. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-artist/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel... And why exactly can't I ask that question?
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI believe it's a reference to this 2004 movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls The original quote being "Oh my god Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white."
- meindnoch 3y agoYes, you can.
- culopatin 3y agoHow else would you ask someone if they are?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- puppymaster 3y agoit's like all the current gaga over RAG and vector dbs when the real ones just use numpy to prototype
- ianand 3y ago> Brilliant idea/URL. Thanks! There's a truth to the name beyond just the play on the transformers paper. Definitely have thought about how many SaaS apps could be a spreadsheet and vice versa and often use them to create mini-apps (often via apps script).
- greensh 3y agoXKCD 2180, https://xkcd.com/2180/ https://xkcd.com/2180/
- ianand 3y agoLOL that’s totally me. Thanks for posting.
- asabla 3y ago> I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch. That sounds wild. Do you or your friend have anything to share about this?
- throwaway2037 3y agoRelated: Excel as ESports parody... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
- elbear 3y agoWell, the real thing exists as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8
- pipes 3y agoOne of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?
- svara 3y agoTry to do something slightly complicated and have GPT4 explain how to do it efficiently in Excel! That's how I do it and it works great. I've gained a new appreciation for Excel.
- darkr 3y agoTry stepping into a management role for a while, ideally one in which you have lots of dealings with less technical parts of a business. Even if it's not for you, at least you'll have gained some insights into that side of things, and more importantly - lots of real world exposure to spreadsheets!
- ccppurcell 3y agoJust an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country) and so on. You need some BASIC and SQL for this but not much
- IggleSniggle 3y agoOh wow. Different poster same problem. Your comment made me realize that it's the "but I don't wanna!" attitude that I already know how to push through when it comes to language learning, just disguised differently. I'm still not sure that I wanna, tho...
- DrDeadCrash 3y agoYou gotta need it ...
- makeitdouble 3y agoI wonder at what point we stop calling them "spreadsheets" though. You mention Excel, and a bunch of us do it Google Sheets, but at this point it's not about sheets of data anymore and more about the interface and runtime, and we have full applications running in it. I remember a colleague running API tests inside his Excel sheet to more easily check for the different parameter combinations, but telling everyone he was still using Postman just to avoid discussing it.
- thelittleone 3y agoI think it still becomes about the data. If using a sheet as an app particularly with sharepoint, data integrity and merging multiple users often becomes a problem. I run one for a financial services firm and often get "excel couldnt merge changes, want to save a copy or discard". We tested this out, 2 users make editing different sheets on a single excel workbook hosted on sharepoint and excel can't figure out how to merge. If someone is on VPN and connection drops this also often occurs.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThis is why for all its faults and limitations, Google Sheets is astronomically better than Excel for collaboration. There is one single source of truth, will full change history and undo-redo of the entire spreadsheet or individual elements, plus comments and chat.
- wil421 3y agoYou can feed postman a CSV to test parameters with. You can also do it on the CLI with Newman.
- makeitdouble 3y agoOnce you've decided to go with Excel it becomes pretty different from just feeding an array of values. You can autogenerate the combinations applying rules on what to avoid, fuzzy the values, get the result of an API transform it and feed it to another API etc. I'm not recommending any of this, but it can go as far as you want...
- ramses0 3y agoCheck out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.
- wycy 3y agoThis seems quite hidden. Googling "google appsheets" results in "did you mean 'google sheets'?" and showing only results for google sheets unless you specifically then request AppSheets. It sounds cool, but I'd hate to rely on it since Google will probably shut it down.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoSeems to be because the actual name is AppSheet and not "Google AppSheet" (even though it is mentioned in this way on their website in some places). Requesting just "AppSheet" gives the right result.
- rqtwteye 3y agoI am not using them so it should be ok for now. Once I start using them it’s almost guaranteed that they will shut down that service.
- greenie_beans 3y agolove appsheets, very powerful.
- yreg 3y agoOur company used to run completely on Google spreadsheets (a lot of it was written by the CEO). It worked, but at some point, it became a convoluted unmaintainable mess. First, we partially switched to Airtable, but soon abandoned it in favour of our own internal node/python tools. The company is now a lot larger and the tools are more robust/capable/clean now, but at the same time, they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.
- throwaway2037 3y agoWhy is this downvoted? Many Wall Street fixed income trading desks were the same before 2010. What you wrote is true for many different types of businesses. A huge amount of sales (customer management) tools are written in Excel/VBA. They work well. It is a great platform.
- rqtwteye 3y ago“ they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.” I have seen that several times while I was a consultant. People run their stuff on spreadsheets. It’s a big mess but things get done . IT comes in and starts producing “professional” systems. Months of requirements gathering, then they deliver something. It’s not 100% right so people need to write tickets. IT may or may not make the changes. If they make a change it takes forever. People still need to do their job so they go back to spreadsheets.
- skipants 3y agoI'm confused... are you just commenting on the name of the website itself or the content? The content itself is about demonstrating how an LLM/Neural net works using a spreadsheet and is a play on the title "Attention is All You Need". It has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet for most of your use cases.
- bunderbunder 3y agoAnd the author's comments on the difficulty of doing matrix multiplication in Excel suggest that he doesn't _actually_ believe that spreadsheets are all you need.