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Comment by denster | Hacker News Reader

We use "nested spreadsheets" that can live in any cell, and combined with aggregate functions like GROUP_BY() we're able to get this behavior.

Would be genuinely curious -- would our approach [1] help w/what you're working on?

[1] Here's an example of how we think about multiple dimensions in spreadsheets (videos + text): https://mintdata.com/docs/learn/core-mechanics/work-with-dat...

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That’s very interesting, but to be perfectly honest it’s almost the exact opposite of how I’d tend to think of things whilst building or manipulating a model. I don’t want to offend anyone, but it feels baroque, like something bolted-on, and it kind of breaks the whole “spreadsheet extruded into arbitrary dimensions” (cube) metaphor.

(Such as how in the accursed Excel, at least up to the last version I was blighted with having to use, one couldn’t take a cell of a Pivot table as the input to another formula elsewhere.)

Just watched the video. I think it is a different approach. The spreadsheets in the video seem row-oriented. It goes more in the direction of a relational database. CubeWeaver is multidimensional, so you don't need a group by function. You can group by a dimension just by creating a new worksheet with less dimensions and copying the data from the original worksheet using a formula. You can also group by an attribute using the JOIN function.

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