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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

My problem with excel is that it is not conducive to making well-documented systems. The formulas are hidden and there's no way to comment them. The ability to name your variables is clumsy and pushed away from the main UI so most users are unaware of it and tend to use anonymous variables. The default UI for creating formulas binds them to a fixed range of cells instead of the entire column, which is absurd.

It's intensely powerful (my boss can do spectacular things with pivot tables and teaches all the business people to do this as a means to doing their own analysis of our reports) but the high-power features have a positively nasty UI compared to the corresponding SQL query.

I'd love to see an Excel designed-from-scratch that scratches the same itches of approachability and user-friendliness but with an awareness of Excel's failings and without obsessing over the spreadsheet metaphor. Something in-between Excel and Access.

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Interesting idea. It's such a difficult usability problem that it's tough to solve it for everyone. I had a job where I was responsible for getting business folk the data they needed and kept on trying to come up with a way for them to extract data from the database without having them to write queries. I got this nugget from the CTO: "To get the expressiveness of SQL you will be writing SQL"

Just need to figure out where the tradeoffs are and I think Excel made a pretty good one. I think Excel shouldn't be used for recurring jobs but for the one off it can't be beat.

Heh, at one smaller group I worked we ended up just creating some query-only SQL accounts for some select technically-inclined business folks and installing Toad on their machines, and let them hit the production database. It worked shockingly well, in spite of the 9000 reasons that this is a terrible idea. For more complicated stuff, we often could handle their service requests just by emailing out a query that they'd just save to the desktop.

It was obviously a really crude approach, but it worked... i've worked at a lot of places with more mature and sophisticated approaches to ad-hoc reporting requests but they were all way more of a headache in terms of IT workload.

Of course, it didn't hurt that one of the VPs quickly became a SQL select-statement guru within the exec team.

We had that going for a while too and it worked well. Someone with a SQL knowledge would write the query and then hand it off to the people with the read only SQL accounts. The issue we ended up running into is that the schema ended up evolving quite a bit so the queries became outdated and gave incorrect results. Then we had to have a process to centralize the queries and turn them into maintained views that could then be used as a the bases for the queries.

Why aren't SQL/ODBC/JDBC APIs exposed as-is?

What does fronting a database with a web service buy you? Rate throttling? Load balancing? Metering?

Why isn't there a JBDC proxy server thingie that does those things for straight JDBC?

>My problem with excel is that it is not conducive to making well-documented systems. The formulas are hidden and there's no way to comment them.

You can leave notes in cells as documentation. I also have an instructions tab in just about every model I have that walks the user through the process. The hidden formula thing can also be partially overcome by using certain colored cells to denote formulas, making the user aware that there are formulas.

Also: Pressing Ctrl + ~ reveals all formulas in the active sheet. A great way to see where all the formulas are quickly.

Excel is super powerful, but I loathe that power. It leads to people doing a ton of amazing, great work in Excel that's super impressive... that no on else can replicate.

If you're really smart about it, Excel is one of the most remarkable tools for analysis ever devised. The problem is virtually everyone who is smart about it can use different better tools that are more suited to their purpose.

> Excel is super powerful, but I loathe that power. It leads to people doing a ton of amazing, great work in Excel that's super impressive... that no on else can replicate.

More than "replicate", I think the problem is no one else -- and, with enough time and complexity, not even the originator -- can maintain it, which results in Excel often being a vehicle for low-initiation-cost and rapidly-rising-maintenance-cost tools (which, in effect, often end up as straightjackets as no one wants to bear the cost of starting over, or the cost of updating, so business processes end up getting constrained by the tool rather than the tool adapting to processes.)

We are working on something close to that. A small, (hopefully) well-chosen subset of typical spreadsheet functionality and combining a few ideas from dimensional data modeling. Trying to make it fun to work and play with your data.

> I'd love to see an Excel designed-from-scratch that scratches the same itches of approachability and user-friendliness but with an awareness of Excel's failings and without obsessing over the spreadsheet metaphor. Something in-between Excel and Access.

I proposed this idea once during a job interview; data analysts were using Excel to model data for providing short term financing. I proposed a web-based system that allowed users to share formulas over large datasets; datasets large enough that you wouldn't materialize them in spreadsheets (dropping the spreadsheet metaphor mentioned above).

Isn't that kind of like Power Pivot?

Take a look at Quantrix, it might suit you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantrix

You should look into Power Pivot for Excel and its corresponding DAX language which allows for modeling.

a modern lotus improv would be welcomed

Googles.

Yeah, that.

Tables in 2007+ makes naming certain sorts of data a lot easier.

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