6 ms·

Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios

178 points by azhenley 2y ago

ziddoap 2y ago
It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space. 1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so maybe I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that. 2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?). This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown. It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.
barathr 2y ago
This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
- aa_memon 2y ago
  Would you be open to sharing the code?
  - barathr 2y ago
    Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH
    - aa_memon 2y ago
      Thank you
phonon 2y ago
Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0] [0] https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/ https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/
- Closi 2y ago
  This was my thinking too - data tables can often do this. The negative of data tables is that it massively slows down your spreadsheet, and cause some weird errors/glitches, but it’s essentially the same thing.
- world2vec 2y ago
  And "Solver", in case you need something really sturdy.
batmenace 2y ago
I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.
ai-christianson 2y ago
At this point I think I'd just resort to throwing together a quick script in Python or Julia to run the scenarios.
dfex 2y ago
The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting. It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space. It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this
- batmenace 2y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Spent the evening reading though some of their work, and it's all so... fun. Just exploring fun and potentially useful ideas not restricted to what tools already exist (which seems to be the case much of the time)
WillAdams 2y ago
This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code. https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/ are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.
- spiralganglion 2y ago
  We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future. [1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling [2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Thank you. I'm peripherally involved in a similar project: https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development. I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?
somat 2y ago
"what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?" Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well. I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?
_blk 2y ago
If I may ask, what spreasheet program is running underneath?
xrd 2y ago
Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.
- thedays 2y ago
  dabbledb was awesome. Simple but powerful. I still miss it and haven’t found anything like it to replace it at a reasonable price.
  - jdougan 2y ago
    I wonder if there is any way of getting X/Twitter to shake it loose?
luizfelberti 2y ago
Computation model behind this vaguely reminds me of the Epic Games programming model thing for Verse Calculus: https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/ https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/
interestica 2y ago
This + sports analytics. So much of sports is about slightly different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall. But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes. (What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)
nxobject 2y ago
Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see plausible distributions of monthly spending. I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs analytically or through simulation. (Hell, I might just recreate it on my own...)
- kqr 2y ago
  There is nothing free and good in this space, last I checked. The alternatives I know of: - GetGuesstimate[1] is probably the most polished, but development on it is slow and it doesn't lean into the same interaction patterns that I think make actual spreadsheets popular. - There are various plugins for the proprietary Microsoft Excel that can do this. I don't remember their names off the top of my head, but sometimes "Monte Carlo" is the phrase that unlocks many searches around this. (Crystal Ball is a name of a plugin that pops into my head.) - One can hypothetically do this in vanilla spreadsheets, by generating arrays of random values and serialising/deserialising to space-separated strings in a cell. This is very, very slow, though. - I have started working on something I call Precel[2] which is not very polished but I think the basic idea (if not the current implementation) can be a solid foundation for a proper spreadsheet-for-full-distributions. [1]: https://www.getguesstimate.com/ https://www.getguesstimate.com/ [2]: https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md
  - 8yt98z2b905o 2y ago
    @Risk is another excel add-in. Found it quite powerful and useful: https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/ https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      @Risk, or specifically their competition, is my prototypical go-to example of "your SaaS product would be much more useful and ergonomic for the user if it were implemented as an Excel spreadsheet".
tmoertel 2y ago
This is like probabilistic programming but with implicit uniform distributions over the supplied values.
ggm 2y ago
How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in this? How could you implement the well known decision support methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to rows, or tables and extra columns?
anonzzzies 2y ago
Only from the title I thought of mr Litt. I love work like this.
rvba 2y ago
Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting idea. Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too. Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g. worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10
portalcell 2y ago
If you liked this you might also enjoy this little toy project: https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spreadsheet/ https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spr...
- mixtape2025-1 2y ago
  Thanks! I liked the implementation so much that I have made a python version here https://github.com/Topping1/probability-spreadsheet https://github.com/Topping1/probability-spreadsheet
globalise83 2y ago
"Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario—even in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names like “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of the three amb values." Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  As long as the operations you're doing aren't too numerically unstable, you could have it use monte carlo methods for moderate numbers of inputs. Sample, say, 10,000 values across the inputs and output averages, output min, 5th percentile, median, 95th percentile, max. Right now I do this either with Python or some auxiliary column full of random values. If you were doing it that way, you could also set distributional values for the variables. Rather than x = {500, 1000}, you could set (say) X ~ N(750, 100) and have it pull samples from that distribution. If you really wanted to get fancy you could take advantage of known results on operations on distributions to keep things exact for a lot of common calculations, then turn to numerical methods for uglier operations (at which point you're basically building a wrapper around one of the usual statistical libraries, I suppose). (EDIT: apparently this already exists, see other comments in this thread.)
arunaugustine 2y ago
This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space. [0]: https://causal.app/ https://causal.app/
gcanyon 2y ago
This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs to a scenario. A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 * 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different sets of criteria. The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter" I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is the one I describe above.
- gklitt 2y ago
  We totally agree! Stay tuned for our next posts on that topic :)
- marco_z 2y ago
  probably one needs something like lazy evaluation, so that things are only computed if needed.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    True, but I'm thinking more from a UI standpoint -- how would you present that complexity to the user, and how would you help them pare it down?
jFriedensreich 2y ago
I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural. It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Yes, but it was Lotus Improv (and the earlier text-based spreadsheet Javelin) which did it first. There is also the opensource Flexisheet: https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet which I wish someone would fork and get running again.
CyberDildonics 2y ago
I've always wanted to explore scenarios.
khoitsma 2y ago
I offer a post from my blog. [Multi-Dimension Data Table MDDT Feb 2025](https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-2025/ https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-...) My preferred approach combines the ubiquity of Excel and the simple power of Python. The large combinatorial effect is addressed.

178 points by azhenley 2y ago

It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space. 1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so maybe I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that. 2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?). This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown. It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.

barathr 2y ago

This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)

aa_memon 2y ago
Would you be open to sharing the code?
- barathr 2y ago
  Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH
  - aa_memon 2y ago
    Thank you

phonon 2y ago

Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0] [0] https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/ https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/

Closi 2y ago
This was my thinking too - data tables can often do this. The negative of data tables is that it massively slows down your spreadsheet, and cause some weird errors/glitches, but it’s essentially the same thing.
world2vec 2y ago
And "Solver", in case you need something really sturdy.

batmenace 2y ago

I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.

ai-christianson 2y ago

At this point I think I'd just resort to throwing together a quick script in Python or Julia to run the scenarios.

dfex 2y ago

The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting. It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space. It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this

batmenace 2y ago
Couldn't agree more. Spent the evening reading though some of their work, and it's all so... fun. Just exploring fun and potentially useful ideas not restricted to what tools already exist (which seems to be the case much of the time)

WillAdams 2y ago

This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code. https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/ are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.

spiralganglion 2y ago
We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future. [1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling [2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Thank you. I'm peripherally involved in a similar project: https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development. I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?

somat 2y ago

"what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?" Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well. I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?

_blk 2y ago

If I may ask, what spreasheet program is running underneath?

xrd 2y ago

Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.

thedays 2y ago
dabbledb was awesome. Simple but powerful. I still miss it and haven’t found anything like it to replace it at a reasonable price.
- jdougan 2y ago
  I wonder if there is any way of getting X/Twitter to shake it loose?

luizfelberti 2y ago

Computation model behind this vaguely reminds me of the Epic Games programming model thing for Verse Calculus: https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/ https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/

interestica 2y ago

This + sports analytics. So much of sports is about slightly different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall. But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes. (What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)

nxobject 2y ago

Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see plausible distributions of monthly spending. I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs analytically or through simulation. (Hell, I might just recreate it on my own...)

kqr 2y ago
There is nothing free and good in this space, last I checked. The alternatives I know of: - GetGuesstimate[1] is probably the most polished, but development on it is slow and it doesn't lean into the same interaction patterns that I think make actual spreadsheets popular. - There are various plugins for the proprietary Microsoft Excel that can do this. I don't remember their names off the top of my head, but sometimes "Monte Carlo" is the phrase that unlocks many searches around this. (Crystal Ball is a name of a plugin that pops into my head.) - One can hypothetically do this in vanilla spreadsheets, by generating arrays of random values and serialising/deserialising to space-separated strings in a cell. This is very, very slow, though. - I have started working on something I call Precel[2] which is not very polished but I think the basic idea (if not the current implementation) can be a solid foundation for a proper spreadsheet-for-full-distributions. [1]: https://www.getguesstimate.com/ https://www.getguesstimate.com/ [2]: https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md
- 8yt98z2b905o 2y ago
  @Risk is another excel add-in. Found it quite powerful and useful: https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/ https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    @Risk, or specifically their competition, is my prototypical go-to example of "your SaaS product would be much more useful and ergonomic for the user if it were implemented as an Excel spreadsheet".

tmoertel 2y ago

This is like probabilistic programming but with implicit uniform distributions over the supplied values.

ggm 2y ago

How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in this? How could you implement the well known decision support methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to rows, or tables and extra columns?

anonzzzies 2y ago

Only from the title I thought of mr Litt. I love work like this.

rvba 2y ago

Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting idea. Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too. Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g. worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10

portalcell 2y ago

If you liked this you might also enjoy this little toy project: https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spreadsheet/ https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spr...

mixtape2025-1 2y ago
Thanks! I liked the implementation so much that I have made a python version here https://github.com/Topping1/probability-spreadsheet https://github.com/Topping1/probability-spreadsheet

globalise83 2y ago

"Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario—even in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names like “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of the three amb values." Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?

rachofsunshine 2y ago
As long as the operations you're doing aren't too numerically unstable, you could have it use monte carlo methods for moderate numbers of inputs. Sample, say, 10,000 values across the inputs and output averages, output min, 5th percentile, median, 95th percentile, max. Right now I do this either with Python or some auxiliary column full of random values. If you were doing it that way, you could also set distributional values for the variables. Rather than x = {500, 1000}, you could set (say) X ~ N(750, 100) and have it pull samples from that distribution. If you really wanted to get fancy you could take advantage of known results on operations on distributions to keep things exact for a lot of common calculations, then turn to numerical methods for uglier operations (at which point you're basically building a wrapper around one of the usual statistical libraries, I suppose). (EDIT: apparently this already exists, see other comments in this thread.)

arunaugustine 2y ago

This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space. [0]: https://causal.app/ https://causal.app/

gcanyon 2y ago

This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs to a scenario. A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 * 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different sets of criteria. The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter" I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is the one I describe above.

gklitt 2y ago
We totally agree! Stay tuned for our next posts on that topic :)
marco_z 2y ago
probably one needs something like lazy evaluation, so that things are only computed if needed.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  True, but I'm thinking more from a UI standpoint -- how would you present that complexity to the user, and how would you help them pare it down?

jFriedensreich 2y ago

I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural. It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.

WillAdams 2y ago
Yes, but it was Lotus Improv (and the earlier text-based spreadsheet Javelin) which did it first. There is also the opensource Flexisheet: https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet which I wish someone would fork and get running again.

CyberDildonics 2y ago

I've always wanted to explore scenarios.

khoitsma 2y ago

I offer a post from my blog. [Multi-Dimension Data Table MDDT Feb 2025](https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-2025/ https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-...) My preferred approach combines the ubiquity of Excel and the simple power of Python. The large combinatorial effect is addressed.