10 ms·

Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?

• rstonge 18y ago
  SQL queries would be really good. I have been in many situations where I would like to do a simple query on a large spreadsheet and can't so I have to resort to programming. Most of the time it is not worth the effort, so I don't bother. This feature would be a big help.
• rms 18y ago
  Queries. Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.
  • pingswept 18y ago
    Just the ability to represent one-to-many relationships in a native way (without resorting to hiding rows or the like) would be a huge step in that direction. The goal could be: make Excel handle more of the borderline cases where you really should be using a simple database, but all you know is Excel.
  • notauser 18y ago
    You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas, and a lot of the rest with pivot tables. For example, getting the sum bill of every person who lives in England looks like this in one workbook I have: {SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))} (If I want to see, say, the top 10 outstanding bills in England I have to use a pivot table). Excels biggest problem is that the workbooks produced with it are really hard to maintain. Looking at the code above, for example... going back to that (which is only a trivial example) in a month is going to be pure pain. Updating data requires cutting and pasting, which can be error prone. Unit testing is only possible with sample known-good data sets, and copying in new data tends to make it less than certain that the version you are using is the same as the one you tested. Oh, and sharing workbooks between users is really tough. I can usually figure out other people's Java - but I have yet to be able to reverse engineer a non-trivial Excel work flow.
    • audentis 18y ago
      BTW, you might be able to throw =large() around that formula to get your top 10 directly
    • ph0rque 18y ago
      > SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0)) Slightly offtopic, but I just wanted to point out that excel syntax looks a lot like lisp, with biggest different being the first item is outside the parens.
      • herge 18y ago
        Excel: The world's most popular functional programming language.
        • khafra 18y ago
          After searching for a decent reverse polish calculator for the iPhone for months, I finally realized that a spreadsheet app fits the bill there as well.
    • jwilliams 18y ago
      You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas, and a lot of the rest with pivot tables. This is true, you can do a lot with this. And if you're prepared to make a lot of columns with the various flags you need, you can build up quite complex queries - having an easy way to do this would be nice though. I've spent a lot of time in Financial Services and it's surprising how much of the industry is run on spreadsheets, especially investment banking - and I mean online - they'll have Excel running all day, receiving real time price feeds, running a calculation and republishing. Excel is pretty much the glue that holds the whole industry together. So I also agree on the maintenance issue - These sheets can get quite complex and it's almost impossible for someone to understand coming in cold. It would be very useful to have a workflow model on top - which I guess is really adding the algorithm aspect - but I've never seen a speadsheet metaphor that does this well.
    • erso 18y ago
  • cabalamat 18y ago
    > Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways. Then why not build database-like functionality into the system?
    • nailer 18y ago
      I'd like to be able to open a database as as spreadsheet, with fields turned into column names, and tables on worksheets. I'd like v and hlookups to be turned into SQL (and vice versa) with animations explaining what's happening in each.
  • kirubakaran 18y ago
    How about this: http://www.bygsoftware.com/Excel/SQL/UsingSql.html http://www.bygsoftware.com/Excel/SQL/UsingSql.html Or: http://www.exceluser.com/explore/msquery1_1.htm http://www.exceluser.com/explore/msquery1_1.htm
  • est 18y ago
    did you mean SQL? You can connect to a .xls via ODBC
• aneesh 18y ago
  Excel is actually a reasonably complete program. That said, I would like to be able to: 1. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel. 2. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit). 3. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet. 4. Reversibly anonymize data -- if I download some logs with usernames or IPs, I don't want those in my analysis (I just hide those columns), but I do need to have a unique identifier for each row. And later get the names back if I want. And a couple things I think Excel is great at already: 1. Making data look pretty. The charts are great, and there's (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/default.aspx http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/defaul...) for non-power users. 2. Making data easily portable. 3. Filtering/sorting data -- VLOOKUP has saved the day so many times.
  • timmorgan 18y ago
    1 million rows??? Who wants to scroll through that mess?
    • gruseom 18y ago
      No one. But people often have that much data - e.g. from mechanical sources - that they need to analyze or report on.
    • lallysingh 18y ago
      I have a lot of tools put out CSV for me. It'd be nice if Excel could handle a few thousand lines when I have a few gigs of RAM.
    • deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
  • newt0311 18y ago
    "more than ~1 million rows." Grow up and use an actual database.
• prakash 18y ago
  Is it aimed at any particular domain? Finance folks pretty much live in excel, they might make a good use-case on what can't be done or what they don't like in excel. Slides 4 & 5 give some insight: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2191289/yaron-minskycufp-2006 http://www.scribd.com/doc/2191289/yaron-minskycufp-2006 While I am not a big user of excel, the google docs version of excel is very similar to the desktop version + collaboration (think Oddpost). The other approach taken by some people I have spoken with is viewing it more as data and tying to do more (think gmail to some extent).
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• andr 18y ago
  65,000. (that's the maximum number of rows in Excel before 2007). I'd like something similar to SPSS, which is more convenient for tables with lots of rows and separates the data from the formulae. A tool for working with streaming data. Also, charting that works for large amounts data. Try having Excel chart 65,000 rows and you'll have time to make coffee while you wait. There are no ways to zoom or analyze Excel charts, either. In fact, charting for data analysis alone is a big enough problem that needs solving (and you won't have to do all that catching up with Excel). Short of using HTML/Flash or .NET/Java components, there is nothing an enterprise worker can use. Get access to a Bloomberg terminal from somewhere and play with its charts to see what I mean.
  • DenisM 18y ago
    Take a look at SQL Server Reporting Services. It's a charting and reporting tool over SQL Server (and I thinkg any other ODBC/OLEDB source), it works over large datasets, has both Web UI and desktop UI, and comes in the box with SQL Server itself. FD: I work in SQL Server, athough not on Reporting Services. FWIW, Reporting is a huge success with our customers.
    • jaxn 18y ago
      It is also available as a free download for developers to try it out and learn / test. I have used SQL Reporting Services as well as Business Objects tools and I am pretty impressed with the latest releases from MS.
• pingswept 18y ago
  This minor, but: A round() function that isn't stupid, i.e. it rounds to a certain number of significant figures, rather than relative to the decimal point. Workarounds exist, but I want a no-work-around. I suppose it's not a problem worthy of very smart programmers, but it still makes me wish for bullets-over-SMTP.
• compay 18y ago
  Export to quote-qualified CSV.
• zain 18y ago
  Automatic versioning and version control.
  • DenisM 18y ago
    Did you try Sharepoint? It does versioning, version control and a bit of collaboration for Excel.
    • notauser 18y ago
      Sharepoint is only really an option if all your users are on Windows.
      • DenisM 18y ago
        Not really. You sacrifice some functionality, but you can still use Sharepoint from a Mac. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx?MODE=ct&CTT=PageView&clr=99-15-0&target=36ae43a9-5dd3-49ab-a304-ca4d5feb66ee1033&srcid=&ep=8&rtype=2&pos=1&quid=fb937136-6f73-418f-9c12-62855c15a796 http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx?MODE=ct&#38... No Linux support of course.
    • Tangurena 18y ago
      Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?" Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.
      • DenisM 18y ago
        You can diff two versions against each other. Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?
        • sctb 18y ago
          That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
• nx 18y ago
  Excel is Turing-complete :P
  • eru 18y ago
    Turing-Machines are Turing-complete, too.
    • nx 18y ago
      O RLY?
      • eru 18y ago
        To make my point explicit: Excel being Turing-complete does not imply it being feature-complete.
        • nx 18y ago
          I know. It was a joke, thus the ":P", and so was the "O RLY?". But maybe the emoticon wasn't clear enough and I should've added an interrobang there? Anyway, thanks for the -10 karma points. BTW, I do my spreadsheets with a Von Neumann derivate of a finite state automaton.
          • eru 18y ago
            Perhaps "O RLY?" was not witty enough?
            • GHFigs 18y ago
              HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A WITTEH I HAS A KARMA IZ WITTEH BIGGER THAN "O RLY"? YARLY UP KARMA!!1 NOWAI DOWN KARMA!!1 KTHX KTHXBYE BTW "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting." BTW http://lolcode.com/
  • eru 18y ago
    Can you prove it? (Not using scripting, of course.)
• bd 18y ago
  Are they aware of Resolver One? It's spreadsheet-Python mashup. http://www.resolversystems.com http://www.resolversystems.com Sometimes I miss similar type of scripting. With Excel, I often finish copy-and-pasting raw data into Python string, upon which I then do something procedural.
• asimjalis 18y ago
  Here are some features that would be nice in Excel: 1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?). 2. Online spreadsheets like Google. 3. Better search and replace. 4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML. Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the table pulled out of the spreadsheet. 5. Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example, imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically.
  • FreeRadical 18y ago
    I thought number 5 was already possible in excel :/
    • jaxn 18y ago
      It is already possible in Excel, but it is very poorly documented. I have a few sheets that I use which pull from a non-ODBC URL using http. It populates a range of cells with new data automatically each time the spreadsheet is opened. (on a Mac too).
  • joe_the_user 18y ago
    "Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example, imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically." Yes. This feature implemented well would create a really cool app. What would be even more interesting would a situation where several different sheets could pull data from each using a clever protocol to avoid the churning of values. Imagine different enterprises which each had online sheets describing their current production abilities and current supply needs. With a clever protocol, their production processes be semi-automatically coordinated (and remember, semi-automatic, some throttling is necessary to prevent self-referential cells from feeding back in an unhelpful way).
• ph0rque 18y ago
  ability to recurse.
  • dmoney 18y ago
    Recursion is fun, but how would you use it in a spreadsheet?
    • RK 18y ago
      Changing values in place? A1 = 0.1*A1 Can be useful if you need to convert values, etc., but don't want to create an entire new row/column
    • ph0rque 18y ago
      Can't think of a concrete example at the moment, but there have been cases when I had to make a financial model with a lot of columns (and rows) where a recursive algorithm would have presented the result I was looking for using a lot less cells.
• ph0rque 18y ago
  3d plotting.
• boucher 18y ago
  I think something that google has begun to do, and that is incredibly valuable, is data "sources" that aren't hard coded into any particular spreadsheet, but that come from a URL or API of some kind. I should be able to make a row of "oil prices by month since 2005" that updates on its own. Or a cell with "current value of the DOW".
  • ctkrohn 18y ago
    There are plenty of third-party plugins that do this -- Bloomberg and Reuters have them, for example. For example, the formula for the current level of the Dow Jones Industrial average is =blp("INDU Index","LAST_PX"). The equivalent Reuters formula is something like =RtGet(".INDU","PXLAST"). At work I have a sheet which pulls in real-time prices on Treasury bonds, interest rate swaps, options, stocks, futures, mortgage-backed securities, etc. and organizes them all into nice tables and charts. It's built on the Bloomberg and Reuters APIs.
• RK 18y ago
  Decent looking plots. If I'm going to make a scatter plot style plot for anything besides an internal memo (even an internal presentation) I always plot with something else.
• ctingom 18y ago
  Look at ASAP Utilities.
• LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  I'm exactly the opposite of your target audience with this question, but hopefully I can give a useful response anyway :) I know almost nothing about Excel and it's a deficiency I feel quite keenly. The program is almost completely undiscoverable to me and I don't even know where to start with it. I know that there are powerful uses and features of Excel but the model (or at least the bits of it I've been exposed to) hasn't clicked for me yet. I suspect I'm not alone in my bafflement; maybe there is the possibility this new spreadsheet could be useful to us Excel-ignorant customers who nonetheless want access to the benefits of this class of software. As a hacker and programmer who is comfortable with all sorts of paradigms I feel really strange admitting this weakness but I suspect that I'm not the only one who is in this boat.
  • DenisM 18y ago
    Did you try Excel 2007 yet? They dedicated entire release trying to make it easier for people to get started with Excel (all of Office, really) and then discover more features as they go along.
• rokhayakebe 18y ago
  Support videos/images. Edit: as well as audio/video comments.
• vzn 18y ago
  I would like to have mind mapping (like http://www.mindjet.com/ http://www.mindjet.com/) right inside excel (as well as for other office applications) but it should be tightly integrated. It seems to me such type functionality might be useful for data crunching and modeling with full brain thinking. Spreadsheets enable only logical half of brain so there is room for improvement.
• CatDancer 18y ago
  Oh my goodness, you're going to get my spreadsheet rant. This is what frustrates me every single time I use Excel (or the Google Docs spreadsheet, for that matter). I may not be answering your question since I'm talking about usability instead of more powerful features, but I can't but imagine that there'd be a market for simple and easy to use, even if it turns out it's not going to be addressed by your particular startup... I have a table, some data that I've laid out in rows and columns. Something simple. How much money I've been paid on my invoices to clients, for example, one invoice per row. Then I want to sum the column, to get how much I've been paid in total. (Yes, I'm talking about a very simple spreadsheet. But that's my point, that something so simple is still messed up!) So I type in a formula: =sum(C2:C10) Now I add a row, to put in another entry. Does my sum change, to include the new row? (C2:C11) No, it does not. So I do not want to be saying sum(C2:C10). I want to say, here is my simple table, and give me the sum of this column. Which, I don't know what the language would look like, but if I named my table "invoices" maybe it would be sum(invoices.C) or sum(invoices.amount) or something. Every time someone comes out with a new spreadsheet (Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs...) I look to see if it is easier to use. Nope! Everyone is too busy being compatible with the last guy.
  • Timothee 18y ago
    Numbers, from the iWork suite, does this. You can name your rows and columns and just them in your formulas: http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/ Of course, it's not perfect if you look at the proprietary format, at the smaller number of formulas than Excel, and so on. But it's a nice piece of software as far as I'm concerned.
    • CatDancer 18y ago
      I don't have a Mac so I don't have a way to tell if iWork does what I want or not, but note that simply being able to name a range doesn't do it.
      • deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
• smanek 18y ago
  An 'inner join' would be nice. A few years ago I worked at a large financial consulting firm, and I was amazed at how often accountants would implement what basically amounted to an 'inner join' using nested iteration over columns in vba. This was a few versions of Excel ago, so I don't know if this feature is available in recent versions or not. I imagine not, since then Excel would really start to encroach on Access's domain.
• lallysingh 18y ago
  One thing nice about Numbers is that you don't worry about cells as an absolute coordinate system. Each table's unique, and you can add/remove rows without hitting everything else. So, in a word, encapsulation. Also, the line between databases & spreadsheets is fairly thin, how about some relational calculus? Some import/export with SQL? Or a query language?
• anamax 18y ago
  Instead of "new, more powerful spreadsheet", how about providing spreadsheet interface for a relational database? Of course, if you want it to be successful, you need to be able to import Excel spreadsheets as is, including macros and formula, and you also may need to maintain the linking to/from other microsoft artifacts.
  • jaxn 18y ago
    Set the Excel Spreadsheet to pull from a remote data source using ODBC. That gives the added security of allowing people to play with the data without changing the data in the database.
    • anamax 18y ago
      But you want them to be able to manipulate the data from Excel. There is a spreadsheet interface metaphor. Parts of it are quite useful. Other parts are less convenient given the ways that people program/use spreadsheets. Some of them are better addressed with parts of the database metaphor.
• IanYorston 18y ago
  Worth a quick look at ThinkDigits for iPhone. http://ignitedsoftware.com/products/thinkdigits/ http://ignitedsoftware.com/products/thinkdigits/
• unalone 18y ago
  I'm not a big spreadsheet person, but I'd throw in aesthetics to the mix. I love Numbers when I have to use it, much more than I like Excel. Even though it's weaker, the looks more than make up for it.
• jlouis 18y ago
  Perhaps, one could gather up some good ideas from Ken Tiltons 'cells' system for Common Lisp?
  • sctb 18y ago
    My understanding of Cells what that it is a dataflow system that handles calculation graphs for some kind of formula. I doubt that it has any insight into user workflows in an actual spreadsheet application.
• mlinsey 18y ago
  Excel doesn't work well on very large spreadsheets (I use it on some sheets with over 150,000 rows.) Things are slow to load, and commands like lookups are extremely slow, enough that I think they're doing O(n) lookups for things like the VLOOKUP command, even when looking up data on tables or sorted columns. What makes the above even worse is that Excel has a pretty poor understanding of when a change necessitates a re-calculation of all values in the workbook, so I grind to a halt when making random unrelated changes (and even if I switch it to manual calculations, it re-calculates upon saving, meaning saving my work can become a 30-40 minute endeavor). Pivot tables are pretty clunky an unintuitive for most users, even though I think lots of people would use them if they understood what they were. VBA is a very verbose and inelegant language, and there are lots of operations which are called in totally different ways than the analagous forumulas in the spreadsheet. There are even some things you can do in spreadsheets which don't have an analagous VBA command, which leads to the fantastic work-around of using cells on your worksheet instead of variables and changing their text values to the command you really want to just run in VBA. The standard fill down operation sometimes doesn't Just Work(TM). Example: say you want to make a cell "=C2E5". You try filling down and you get "=C3E6", when you wanted "=C3E5", because E5 is a constant. OK, fair enough, you say, you can't reasonably expect the machine to infer what you meant. But now you adjust the cell below to what you want, and now you select two cells, one that's "=C2E5", one right below it that is now "=C3E5", and now with both selected, you fill down again. Presto, the next cells are "=C4E7","=C5E7","=C6E9","=C7E9","=C8E11".... etc. That's pretty bad. Some of these are pretty mundane, but they would all be big deals for me.
  • parbo 18y ago
    Use $ to keep copy/fill from autoincrementing. $E$5
• bootload 18y ago
  "... In the long term, it is unlikely that any particular ASP will survive without you needing to migrate your data to something else. ... The issue you bring up, of how do you deal with the fact that it is unlikely most ASPs will be around to maintain your data, is a good one. It should be discussed and careful attention should be paid to it. Your suggestion to go with ones that have the most partners and customers (VisiCalc's situation in its day) doesn't fit with your comparison to staying away from VisiCalc. ..." From the man (Dan Bricklin) himself ~ http://www.bricklin.com/nextvisicalc.htm http://www.bricklin.com/nextvisicalc.htm
• nadim 18y ago
  Some thoughts: -With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there. -Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, and maybe even restricting access within worksheets within the document.
• swombat 18y ago
  Hmm, I've seen some pretty hair-raising stuff done with Excel already... I don't think we need to increase its capabilities any further. It's an extremely powerful piece of software already.
• skmurphy 18y ago
  The fundamental problem is that Excel forces a novice (and actually everyone) to work at a level of detail such that key elements of the plan or analysis are lost in a forest of low level code. I would focus on the novice because it will be hard to get power users to switch. Letting a user pick a range or distribution for an input instead of a specific value will help to avoid anchoring around the "one right answer." Compare two spreadsheet highlighting changes more intelligently than Excel's. For example, allow for a more intentional representation of decisions/numbers/inputs: control variable relationships/rules: system representation outputs/results: state variable Track changes to indicate if inputs or rules/relationships changed, optionally ignore output changes Allow for a set of input variables (and optionally some rules) to be defined as a scenario to compare differences between scenarios. Also, let an input variable be a distribution or an interval and the scenario specify any covariances. Scenario planning and decision trees: a graphical view that can switch to a traditional spreadsheet view and vice versa. EDIT http://www.google.com/search?q= http://www.google.com/search?q="next+generation+spreadsheet" turns up some interesting ideas as well.
• ecommercematt 18y ago
  In no particular order, here are some desirable features: 1) Version control. 2) Access restrictions and permissions. BONUS: Responsibilities, a la Siebel and other CRMs. 3) Simple drag and drop manipulation of data, such as concatenation. 4) Wufoo-like ease with building data entry forms. 5) Dummy data mode, so you can get help with customizing a complicated spreadsheet without revealing sensitive data. 6) Example use cases for sophisticated features, with well-written instructions, INOW a good, non-linear tutorial.
• frig 18y ago
  Quantrix is already a better excel and look how well they're doing for themselves (or not). But seriously: take a gander at quantrix, rip off its features, slap yourself on the back for innovating, and go home. Edit: the above is perhaps a bit too snarky to be helpful. As a "power spreadsheet user" I moved on from excel to quantrix; this is something I can get away with b/c I'm not stifled with a closet full of legacy, mission-critical excel spreadsheets. Quantrix is pretty much at the sweet spot of spreadsheet functionality: it's possible to imagine a more-powerful and more-general-purpose tool, but taking it even a little further would turn it into something not really a spreadsheet any more...you'd wind up back at R. You'll find in Quantrix a mature, well-thought, and all-around "better excel".
• jderick 18y ago
  I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the ability to import that same format.
• markessien 18y ago
  Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube.
  • jaxn 18y ago
    like an OLAP viewer?
• colinplamondon 18y ago
  Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything.
• nailer 18y ago
  I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a dictionary in a cell.
• nailer 18y ago
  A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before. findincolumn('john',a) scrollaccross(3) retrievedata
• thorax 18y ago
  Best ideas I have here: * Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets. * Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull in other people's spreadsheets across the world to use as one of your cells (somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, I suppose) * Alternatively, I'd like to see Excel go three dimensional for a single sheet. At a minimum perhaps use "layers" like Photoshop would to apply transformations and adaptations that collapse into the final view. * I'd prefer this imaginary Excel also use Python or JavaScript for cell programming/calculations. * I second the versioning information idea, too-- keep a history of every manual change to every cell and allow them to be reverted. In a git-esque way, support branching of cells, etc.
• aaw 18y ago
  I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization: 1. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a (name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it. 2. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame" feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily. 3. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out a tree of formulas would be an improvement.
• c1sc0 18y ago
  Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and 'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be accessed by us computational types.
• pasbesoin 18y ago
  diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae, cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting recognition of intracell text formatting. Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then the data format and API's will be less... obtuse. Interactive, visual interface to same diff functionality. When I last looked, for Excel there was a product or two going partway in this direction; however, most seemed rather limited, e.g. export the cell contents to text and diff that. Useful for number crunchers. Also useful for all the people who end up using something like Excel as a glorified table. In the business world, there are endless use cases of people managing documents, requirements, results, etc. in Excel. Providing such a "BeyondCompare" fucntionality for this content would be very useful to a lot of them, (Caution: You might also have to teach them how to use it, including the diff concept. And that could be a very significant bump to try to get over.) Since Excel is so dominant, that class of people might not be your target market. Nonetheless, I see a good diff type utility as being a real plus. I also can agree with Zain's comment regarding versioning support. And, integrated regexp support. I wedged same in to Excel/VBA by defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (back in 1999 or 2000). Very useful. A lot of problems people deal with in spreadsheets can be greatly aided by decent pattern matching and substitution.
• sebg 18y ago
  As someone who works in an investment bank, it would be great if this new, more powerful spreadsheet played nicely with Bloomberg, Reuters, and Factset.
• imp 18y ago
  Smart conversions. If I have a graph of something in Celsius, I have to copy the data, edit it, and create a new graph just to convert it to Fahrenheit. Same with any other unit of measurement. When I was an engineer my biggest gripe with Excel was that it didn't know anything about my data.
• jodrellblank 18y ago
  An interactive shell (Python, with Excel objects and helper methods ready provided).
• MaysonL 18y ago
  Have it interface with Fluidinfo.com. [which should be going alpha sometime soon]
• jmackinn 18y ago
  I am a huge fan of Excel. It's the program that I use most for doing work. At the entry user end, there are so many features that are simply unusable or technically way to difficult. For the power user of Excel, there is very little that can't be accomplished. It's power is basically limitless with VBA (or choose your favorite scripting language). Apart from the comment suggesting larger sizes to the sheets (larger than 1 million rows) and being online (something that would really not fly in most corporations) I can't find a problem in here that can't be accomplished with Excel and a firm knowledge of scripting for it. This may be a cop-out though as you must actually script the stuff yourself. This, however; is why I love this program so much. So as for building a more powerful spreadsheet program for the power user market, it's going to be very hard for anyone to produce something that does more because it's already basically limitless. For the novice user though, the program is convoluted, confusing and extremely limited. The novice user also represents a much bigger market. I have had several jobs simply because people couldn't do things in Excel that I assumed a monkey could do. Companies love Excel even though 99% of employees at them have no idea how to do basic things with it (summing columns for example). Giving some of the 99% of employees a program that they can do basic to intermediate things without having the limitless back end scripting power would put me out of many of my jobs. Excel at the start is like a country kid visiting the big city for the first time. There is just way to much power in it and the map for getting around is far too confusing, but once you've been living there for a while everything about it becomes a breeze. Making that adjustment easier would be a huge benefit. On a side note I enjoy using Google Spreadsheets but one of my top wishes is that Google, or someone, would implement either a Google scripting language or a allow for other scripting languages (Ruby, Python, VBA) to be used.
• niels_olson 18y ago
  Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559
  • yters 18y ago
    Does R Commander fit your needs? http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/ http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
    • niels_olson 18y ago
      not even close. That was a quick slap-together for an undergrad class. And the look and feel is just painful. SPSS would be a better model.
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• lisper 18y ago
  http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt
• brent 18y ago
  I do not use Excel regularly and I thus am certainly not a power user. However, I would think scripting for plots would be useful (like I do in matlab or matplotlib) for repetitive, highly configured, high quality plots with the ability to easily export them as ps or pdf. This may very well be possible now (and I'm just ignorant), but that would be one thing that would be handy that I have not seen.
• Spyckie 18y ago
  1.) automatic smart chart creation - the spreadsheet guesses the kind of data I'm inputting and builds a chart on the fly. 2.) UI that values datasets over data points, or some sort of functionality that defines a dataset. Since most tasks deal with sets as a whole (and not individual points) this would result in a much cleaner, quicker interface. Also, you could start treating a dataset like a black box instead of a TON of cells with meaningless value, and thereby gain access to a lot of shortcuts not possible currently. This should allow easy data entry, dataset searching, and will keep all your scripting in your view. Best of all, there's no need to manipulate cells at all with a dataset approach.
• JeffL 18y ago
  I would like to do conditional formatting on one column based on the contents of another column.
  • yters 18y ago
    Can't you do this by making your conditional format for a cell dependent on another column, and then use the format for all cells in the column?
• crsmith 18y ago
  Freeze multiple, unconnected columns and rows. That way I could view the descriptions at the top and the sums at the bottom while I'm scrolling through any point in a spreadsheet.
• egl 18y ago
  You can't tell whether you got the right answer. My rule of thumb is that any interesting spreadsheet has a mistake. Anyone who uses a spreadsheet and doesn't independently know the answer "close enough" is living in a fool's paradise.
• neilk 18y ago
  1. Really, really great looking graphs. Excel fails so hard at this it's unbelievable. 2. Easy navigation. The giant spreadsheet model is a very simple metaphor but sometimes I'd like a way to jump to different parts of it more easily. 3. Not be a spreadsheet. The one-big-sheet model might be better represented as a bunch of smaller tables floating in space with formulas interconnecting them. The letter/number convention has been around since the very first spreadsheet, surely we can do better. 4. Understand the internet. RSS, live stock quotes, etc. The address of a cell ought to be internet-compatible somehow, e.g. http://myspreadsheets.com/daily_report/C2 http://myspreadsheets.com/daily_report/C2 or http://myspreadsheet.com/daily_report/mynamedtable?x=Jan2007&y=profit http://myspreadsheet.com/daily_report/mynamedtable?x=Jan2007.... Google Docs does something like this, I think. 5. Allow scripting in a language that doesn't completely suck. Javascript or python would be good choices.
  • wizard_2 18y ago
    The newer excels have much much much better graphic capabilities
    • apgwoz 18y ago
      But do they adhere to principles preached by Edward Tufte and other data vis "gods?" (I don't know, I'm asking)
  • drewp 18y ago
    Amen to the end of one-big-sheet. Apple seems to have addressed that: http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/ (I don't know if their version is any good)
  • brendano 18y ago
    I'm still waiting for an Excel-like program that can make graphs as pretty as R.
• mwexler 18y ago
  One interesting model of where spreadseets may go is Resolver, at http://code.google.com/p/resolver/ http://code.google.com/p/resolver/ or http://www.resolversystems.com/ http://www.resolversystems.com/. Most of the issues complained about here can be solved through the Python back end.
  • gruseom 18y ago
    It seems to be an elegant tool. But as I see it, it deviates from the core value of spreadsheets, which is putting computing power in the hands of non-programmers. Most spreadsheet users will balk at learning Python.
• critic 18y ago
  They must be very good, if they are expected to come up with something within a few months that will be able to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Open Office. I can't wait to see it.
• ken 18y ago
  Separation of data, formulas, and graphs (a la MVC). It shouldn't be a mystery to me whether a number is data I've entered, or a result of a computation. It should also have a real solver, so I don't have to work out formulas on paper first. If I can type in some equations (legibly) and it's possible to derive the data I want from the data and formulas I've given, then just do it. (I understand Lotus Improv got this right. In fact, from what I've read about it, Lotus Improv got many things right. A modern clone of Improv would be cool.) Also, it should know units. If my search engine can do unit conversions on the fly, my spreadsheet ought to be able to. Better graphing. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but every time I try to make a graph in a spreadsheet, I end up with something that doesn't look at all like I wanted. N.B., I've basically given up on spreadsheets. For lists, I use an outliner. For simple math, I use a HLL like Ruby or Lisp or Octave. I suspect if there was an OmniOutliner for Windows, Excel would die overnight.
• kirubakaran 18y ago
  Emacs key bindings please.
  • apgwoz 18y ago
    Maybe a better contribution would have been to say, "highly customizable keyboard navigation, to make using it mouseless possible"
    • kirubakaran 18y ago
      I agree.
• gcanyon 18y ago
  As others have written, some of the things I've longed for in Excel are found in Numbers -- they're also available in Ragtime: the ability to place multiple spreadsheets independently in a single document and work on full ranges within them. Ragtime adds rotation of spreadsheet objects. I prefer lightweight databases to spreadsheets, so my suggestions would be similar to what FileMaker says: http://www.filemaker.com/articles/database/new_database.html http://www.filemaker.com/articles/database/new_database.html In short: make it easy to present a set of information through different views, make it easy to share between users, make it easy to create and maintain complex data structures and validation. Presenting information from the spreadsheet through the web, with or without edit capability, would be good.
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• iigs 18y ago
  Disclaimer: not particularly a power user. Problem also probably more of a UI/UX issue than a technical issue. From time to time when I'm working in excel I'll find I've derived an answer from a couple adjacent input cells and several intermediate calculation step cells below. As a contrived example, lets say I have pennies per number of hours and I want to convert to dollars per year. I'll start with hours per year (365.25*24) and divide that by the input "number of hours". Then I'll divide the input "number of pennies" by 100 to get dollars. Then I'll multiply the two together to get my output. Without fail after working through a problem like this I will want to make a 2-D grid with an input variable on each axis and have the results filled into the grid. Unfortunately because I just did it using a bunch of intermediate cells I can't copy and paste, drag and fill, or any of the other intuitive mechanisms. To date the only solution I've found to this problem is to re-do all of my work in VBA as a single function and use =myFn(colval,rowval) in each cell. There are a couple ways this could play out. One of which would be to call subordinate sheets (or chunks of sheets) as functions. This is how I've envisioned it in my head. It would be a terrible pain to make that work, and I'd be afraid it would confuse people who wouldn't understand which cells worked normally and which cells were function components. Another solution would be to select an output cell and have it refactor it to a function that could be called. This is probably a lot easier to do, but might not be as maintainable by the kinds of people that don't understand VBA -- they could keep the "source code" cells around and recompile when changes are made, but all of the standard code generator / manual edit problems apply.
• nrao123 18y ago
  I have not read all the comments since there are too many of them. Here is my wish list(I am an ex- Mgmt consultant) without knowing if its already covered in the comments: 1) Creating a new tab/sheet and choosing if the tab should be a document or spreadsheet type so that I can run my numbers once and reference my table in the document and not worry about cutting and pasting. Really helps reduce word document and report writing. This is a fundamential mind set shift as an excel spreadsheet hardly goes on its own. Its always accompanied by a document and syncing the numbers between the report/tables and the excel is a massive PITA. 2) Importing some functionality of Access (running unique/group by queries, inner join/outer join etc...) in Excel. Helps me run complex data queries while maintaining data integrity. 3) A wiki like online spreadsheet. (dont think Google Docs does this. For e.g. if we are running a valuation for a company and each team mate has different assumptions for each variables, this can help team mates input thier assumptions and track it and see the overall impact on the numbers. Instead of the current model of emailing spreadsheets back and forth or erasing new data over old ones (e.g. like Google Spreadsheets). Btw- I strongly believe just implementing this last point alone and narrowly defining yourself as a model builder (with wiki like enterprise capabilites) would generate strong traction in I-Banks, Buy side firms, sell side research firms, market research companies, mgmt consulting firms, insurance companies etc... Would love to try out a beta version if available. my email is raonikhilesh "@" gmail
• PoweredByWill 18y ago
  OLE is a joke, if this is a client-side application add embeddable spreadsheet widgets. Pivot-tables would be nice as a core function to model data (see quantrix.com) Make 'light databases' part of the architecture and not counter-design. something like, spreadsheets meets csv with a cli query component or similar.
• jblondon 18y ago
  1. It should be possible to turn a sheet into a function. So I can then define my own 'inputs' and 'outputs' for that sheet, and 'call' it with whatever parameters I like from another sheet. Sure it can be done in code, but for building large, maintainable models that's not practical. 2. 'Hard' and 'Soft' numbers (i.e., numbers I manually enter vs. numbers that are the result of a formulae) should be automatically coloured accordingly if I want them to be. Manually plugging in a number on top of a formula should not necessarily over-write the formula. It's quite common I want to preserve the logic but 'hack in' a variable. Instead, it's either or (and I have to copy/paste the formula into a comment for the cell, which is a pain and clumsy as hell). 3. Track changes. 4. Non-euclidean topology ... by which I mean, making it possible to vary the number of colums / rows and column / row sizes within a single sheet.
• vincentvwyl 18y ago
  Instead of the programming angle, I would like a user-interface that works for right-brained people and doesn't drive you bonkers after spending more than a few hours on it. That would be a blue ocean in the world of spreadsheets.
• chris_l 18y ago
  For conventional programming I've been working on laying the logic out as a graph automatically. Instead of cryptic formulas in the cells, you would have an easy to understand graph that shows how information is related and computed. In addition the intermediate results for selected input values could be shown next to the nodes and links, to allow inspection of the computation. This could be adapted for the spreadsheet concept. Actually, it might be more appropriate there.
• gsiener 18y ago
  FWIW, I would often query a database and make completely de-normalized datasets that I'd paste into Excel. Then I would pivot the crap out of them and figure out how I wanted to slice the data...
• khafra 18y ago
  The ability to do regex matches to cells, not just full exact text with a case sensitive/insensitive option.
• Vitriol 18y ago
  Please do pivot tables
• abc3 18y ago
  I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See: http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google The thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns, specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings, instead of through websites like Gurufocus. For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman: http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman You can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC Info: http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt Clearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely available SEC filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/000106176808000206/acn3q08.txt http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...) into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than I'd like.
• timae 18y ago
  I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get GoogleChartsAPI url". That'd be sweet.
• misterbwong 18y ago
  Excel's core functionality is great, but many of its extended functions are hard to use and/or limited. In addition to adding functionality, you could revamp some of the functions that excel currently doesn't do well. My list would be: 1. Multi-user experience - Better workbook sharing and editing. 2. Better scripting (already mentioned above) 3. More than 65536 rows! 4. Queries/Lookups - It may be that I'm not proficient enough, but it seems like VLOOKUP and pivot tables can be done A LOT better. FYI our old company was considering buying a product to extend excel functionality. Probably a possible competitor. Check it out: http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/xcelsius/ http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/xcelsius/
• mattmcknight 18y ago
  I think something that mixes structured and tabular data together would be great. If you had a worksheet style "dynamically typed" structure that was supplemented by some structured tables of data that could be easily referenced and updated by Excel style formulas, it would be very useful. In this way the spreadsheet sits as a layer on top of several database tables that can be shared between users. I sort of imagine the ultra-flexible spreadsheet on one monitor and this floating collection of data tables on the other one. It's a hybrid.
• code_devil 18y ago
  1. create a Table and then have an option to create the corresponding mySQL. (Relation DB Design) 2. create a mySQL Dump from the Table Data. 3. Other cool MySQL Optimizations.
• jherdman 18y ago
  I want access to whatever data is inside the spreadsheet. Currently Excel locks away your data unless you use a library of some sort that may not necessarily be 100% accurate, or capable of a specific feature. Likewise, generating spreadsheets should be easy for 3rd parties.
• kul 18y ago
  Excel on the Mac really sucks and I don't really want to install Windows just for that.
• knectar 18y ago
  I worked in a consulting firm that had built its entire business on Excel "apps", heavy, clever VBA-driven rich GUI interface spreadsheets applications that were replicated time the number of people in the client organization. While a bit wonky, and web-naive in way, these app's proved to be surprisingly resilient and flexible for "lowly" Excel (lowly only in the hierarchy of "legit" programming environments). From this experience, I would say that what would have been a profoundly useful tool, would be a software conversion tool, that could capture some of the logic, or UI of such "apps" and webify them, or at least convert some of the syntax into better object oriented code. This is of course a tall order, if not impossible. The dream of automating quality code may be nigh impossible, but it would be a huge business value even if executed only in part.
• GHFigs 18y ago
  An alternative question might be: what are you doing in Excel today for which Excel was not intended? I remember Wil Shipley (of Omni, Delicious Monster) talking about how they originally developed OmniOutliner after noticing that most people were using Excel to make simple lists rather than complex spreadsheets, so there was a market for something less expensive than Excel and more tailored to the things people were actually doing with it. With a product as broadly installed as Excel I'm sure there's still under-served niches.
• micks56 18y ago
  I have to use old software databases at my engineering job. The only way to get the data out of the system is to show it on the screen 1 at a time or to print it out. I would love for this new spreadsheet to pretend to be a printer and have the data piped directly to my spreadsheet instead of my pdf printer.
  • gruseom 18y ago
    Upvoted for the craziest bad-ass suggestion in the whole thread.
    • micks56 18y ago
      Thanks. Every engineering company I have worked at had these legacy databases. They all allow you to enter information (not very well), see the information on your screen, or send a report to the printer. Piping data to a spreadsheet is something almost everyone in the companies I work with (I am a consultant) could do. These aren't sophisticated users. Even the ones with recent EE degrees aren't programming in their spreadsheets. The Mechanical Engineers don't even know that you can. What they do need is tools to analyze the data existing in these large databases. Switching to another database/interface is not an option. To extend my original idea: Excel has a way to import data from a text file. It works ok. Select your field delimiter, etc. What would be awesome is if I could draw my own macro on the screen. Make it more powerful. Excel shows me how my input data will work in the spreadsheet. Do that, but give me more editing tools. Here is why: the data coming out of these databases to the printer is structured. Every record looks the same. If I can draw what one case looks like all of my data will be entered to the spreadsheet correctly. I know I am not explaining this well, but if anyone (including the YC group) wants me to elaborate further I will. I would pay for a spreadsheet that has these 2 features. A large part of my job is analyzing data in my customer's database. I can provide my customer with more value if the data input to spreadsheet is trivial as opposed to me billing for several hours performing the task by hand.
• anamax 18y ago
  (1) Optional Fortress like "typing". It's almost always a mistake to add a number representing an amount of dollars to a number referring to feet. And feet can't be added to meters. Heck, it's typically wrong to add gigabytes to megabytes without a conversion (which depends on whether you're talking about disk space or ram). (2) Many of the complaints mentioned come from the way that a given entity, "the sheet" (or page) is used to both computation and to present multiple computations. Rethinking that is likely to yield huge benefits. (3) It should be possible to tag computations so they can be more easily used to build other computations. For example, I was recently doing some cost analysis and realized part way through that I'd like to break down the numbers in other ways. Since I was using a sequence of equations in an ordinary programming language, it was easy enough to define appropriate accumulators and pick up the values from the equations, but it would have been a pain with a spreadsheet. And, my solution was too granular. I'm not expressing (3) very well, but I think that it's a big deal, so feel free to contact me.