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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

The 2D aspect is the part of Excel I don't understand. Why does it have to be a grid?

It's great for laying out things meant to print, and making invoices and stuff... But why didn't we have code files and proper fixed layout DB-style tables as "pages" that can go in a workbook?

Maybe keeping everything as 2D as possible is a necessary compromise for the spatial thinkers out there, and they just wouldn't want it if it was full of boring linear stuff.

I love the reactivity and the concept that anywhere you put a value, you can put an =expression. But the 2D stuff seems like it's for the people who always have a sense of where things are in space.

They've done a good job of convincing people that it's not programming and they can do it, I can't really complain, because if Excel didn't exist we might all still have to use paper on a regular basis, or completely unstructured text files.

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This is why I'm fanatical about using proper Tables in Excel wherever possible. Any db-like kind of data is first turned into a table, then I work with it using whatever formulas, code, or tools I need to. Half the time this means dropping into PowerQuery to do more transformations on the entire set, then finally using Excel formulas or pivots as needed.

But I really like Excel for allowing me to just plop stuff down wherever when I'm brainstorming something, or just want to do a one-off calculation before I quit-without-saving.

> Why does it have to be a grid?

Because we have been doing it that way for almost 4,000 years!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#History

Humans have organized data into tables, that is, grids of columns and rows, since ancient times. The Babylonians used clay tablets to store data as far back as 1800 BCE.[16] Other examples can be found in book-keeping ledgers and astronomical records.[17]

Since at least 1906 the term "spread sheet" has been used in accounting to mean a grid of columns and rows

It’s because Excel sheets are often used like forms to fill some fields in, with labels, and dedicated formulas in the background. And sometimes part of that form is a table, but also graphical charts etc. on the side. Excel sheets can be designed almost like in a layout program, also to be suitable for printout. People like that freeform spatial-thinking flexibility about Excel.

It's amazing as a layout program for sure, as long as you're not going to interact with it much on mobile.

Then it's pretty bad but still better than writing some custom software like people would probably do without it.

When doing calculations on paper, you can write your interim results anywhere. That's what excel copies. It's also why text in excel files will gladly overflow into adjacent cells.

The overflowing text isn't actually stored in the adjacent cells, it's just displayed on top of them. The difference is important.

That kind of thing seems very natural if you've done any calculations on paper recently(Which most business people have) but seems strange to programmers who haven't.

You would think the ideal would be to allow everything Excel currently does, but also have some other model with more separation of code, data, and visuals, like node-based programming and separate cloud-synced pure tables.

Excel can almost cover a lot of "real programming" use cases, but not quite. The upgrade path seems to be Excel to Access to Custom app, rather than Excel to Excel but with more of the advanced features.

Everybody who replies to you, I think, has gotten it wrong. What you're asking is not why any grid, but why an infinite un-malleable grid.

What you want is the paradigm of Numbers from Apple. Their office suite is good, and it has the benefit of being opinionated. They're not trying to ape Microsoft, like all the open-source projects.

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