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That's right, and this is why a better tool is needed. In the end Excel can't support arbitrary levels of abstraction. IMO this is not because the base model i

That's right, and this is why a better tool is needed. In the end Excel can't support arbitrary levels of abstraction. IMO this is not because the base model is a grid (after all, "proper databases" also follow that table model) but because you can't create new tables on the fly and treat them as new objects independent of their structure. Once you build a data type as fields laid out as columns, all the operations on that data (mainly filters and search) need to be operated by hand. You can't properly express in Excel something like "there are three collections of employees, and I can create a '' function that works on any of the three". If you have separate tables with the same structure, you need to replicate the same operations on each independent table; the only way to build reusable code is with Visual Basic macros, which falls outside the spreadsheet declarative model. But if you could create new functions with Excel formulas (like style handling or business processes) and apply them to any arbitrary table having the adequate structure, I think you could have robust abstractions within the spreadsheet context itself - from a theoretical level, the storage model of spreadsheets is no different from that of relational databases.

cm2187 12y ago
I cannot agree more. Apple's stab at Excel with Calcs is the way Excel should always have been. A blank sheet to which you can add tables or charts, not a single grid. You only need to add an index by which you can query these tables (instead of VLOOKUPs), and you have something as simple and flexible as a spreadsheet and as powerful as a database. Microsoft seem to be keen to observe and take inspiration in what is done outside, but somehow the office team seems to be an exception. Apart from re-shuffling around the buttons, I can hardly tell the difference between Excel 2000 and Excel 2013.
- TuringTest 12y ago
  To be fair, Excel internals must be too brittle to allow for more extreme redesigns; they've been piling up layer upon layer of technological changes for three decades, and they need to keep it working without crashing too much. I don't know Apple's Calcs, but Microsoft has built the PowerPivot extension that largely works as a modern, parallel version of Excel embedded within the same window. If you need to work on Excel with large datasets and/or complex relations, it may pay off to learn this extension.
  - cm2187 12y ago
    The Visual Studio team overcame a similar problem with a complete rewrite. I think the problem is more about breaking the compatibility, many add-ins rely to a very old COM interface. But I think people wouldn't mind a breaking change if it comes with really new and powerful capabilities. In fact it would provide an incentive to upgrade. And it can run side by side with old-style spreadsheets that preserve compatibility. The problem is not so much large datasets, for which there are better tools than Excel. It has more to do with doing more advanced thing conceptually. For instance, what about adding a table to a sheet (Apple Calcs style), specifying a name and some inputs cells, and one output cell or range, and then being able to use that table as a function anywhere else in the workbook. I can already solve these types of problems with a UDF, but think about users who do not know how to code. Also, having the logic of a function in excel formula format makes it easily auditable by a non-programmer. And also what about manipulating data in memory instead of having everything in big sheets and having to link every cell with each other, or having nested tables in a cell (or a reference to a table in memory or in another sheet). And this is Excel only. Word and PowerPoint should really have a mark-up language side by side with the visual representation. That would make it so much easier to manage metadata (object names, linking a piece of text to an external source, working with templates, etc).

cm2187 12y ago

I cannot agree more. Apple's stab at Excel with Calcs is the way Excel should always have been. A blank sheet to which you can add tables or charts, not a single grid. You only need to add an index by which you can query these tables (instead of VLOOKUPs), and you have something as simple and flexible as a spreadsheet and as powerful as a database. Microsoft seem to be keen to observe and take inspiration in what is done outside, but somehow the office team seems to be an exception. Apart from re-shuffling around the buttons, I can hardly tell the difference between Excel 2000 and Excel 2013.

TuringTest 12y ago
To be fair, Excel internals must be too brittle to allow for more extreme redesigns; they've been piling up layer upon layer of technological changes for three decades, and they need to keep it working without crashing too much. I don't know Apple's Calcs, but Microsoft has built the PowerPivot extension that largely works as a modern, parallel version of Excel embedded within the same window. If you need to work on Excel with large datasets and/or complex relations, it may pay off to learn this extension.
- cm2187 12y ago
  The Visual Studio team overcame a similar problem with a complete rewrite. I think the problem is more about breaking the compatibility, many add-ins rely to a very old COM interface. But I think people wouldn't mind a breaking change if it comes with really new and powerful capabilities. In fact it would provide an incentive to upgrade. And it can run side by side with old-style spreadsheets that preserve compatibility. The problem is not so much large datasets, for which there are better tools than Excel. It has more to do with doing more advanced thing conceptually. For instance, what about adding a table to a sheet (Apple Calcs style), specifying a name and some inputs cells, and one output cell or range, and then being able to use that table as a function anywhere else in the workbook. I can already solve these types of problems with a UDF, but think about users who do not know how to code. Also, having the logic of a function in excel formula format makes it easily auditable by a non-programmer. And also what about manipulating data in memory instead of having everything in big sheets and having to link every cell with each other, or having nested tables in a cell (or a reference to a table in memory or in another sheet). And this is Excel only. Word and PowerPoint should really have a mark-up language side by side with the visual representation. That would make it so much easier to manage metadata (object names, linking a piece of text to an external source, working with templates, etc).