
Excel Unusual – home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets - hardmaru
http://www.excelunusual.com/
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saagarjha
> Excel is cheap and ubiquitous, everyone has it.

Compared to other programming languages, it’s certainly not cheap! In
comparison to numerical analysis tools, maybe…

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setquk
Indeed. It’s also only cheap until you find a company that was entirely
powered by sticky tape and string in excel and the resident excel expert rides
his motorbike into the back of a truck.

I have been the clean up guy there. Reverse engineering it is worse than
reverse engineering Perl. Been that guy too.

~~~
grivescorbett
Can spreadsheets not be documented in the same way that code can?

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froindt
They can be, but often aren't. I basically make spreadsheets for a living, and
actively try to do a good job of documenting how it works. Among other things
that can help:

Adding comments in VBA. Why nobody does this is beyond me, but I've fixed
dozens of spreadsheets with no comments.

Using named ranged and tables (not just plopping data in). Named ranges make
formulas beautiful (=balance * interest rather than =B17 * F14). Tables help
with formulas and make VBA accessing data much nicer.

Using cell styles to clue people in about functionality. The orange "input"
style is an instant clue-in for people who know my spreadsheets. If they are
scared of breaking things, those are the safe cells.

Using the "explanatory text" style next to inputs or to add notes throughout.

Organizing things in a cohesive manner. Often developers define their
variables at the top of a function or sub rather than mixing them in
throughout. That same amount of forethought can make spreadsheets much easier
to follow.

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userbinator
The demoscene has had a bit of fun with Excel too:

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=11368](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=11368)

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021)

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apo
Cool stuff.

Under "Why bother with this blog?" are some off-topic ideas - this one for
example:

 _The most important aspect: no matter what you want to do, start by thinking
before reading from someone else or asking someone else (no matter who). ..._

I suppose the value of this nugget depends on your goal. If your goal is to
invent something devoid of any previous human experience, I suppose it could
apply. Think outside the box. Reaallly outside the box. In fact, there is no
box.

But if your goal is to invent something or solve any problem whatsoever that
involves previous human experience (99.99% of situations), this seems more
like an antipattern. Right up there with "never show anyone what you've done -
they might steal it."

Still, this comment makes me think back to my days of programming on an old
6502 Atari computer. It was so hard to get documentation that it seemed like
everything I did was my own invention - no matter how trivial. It's not hard
to feel creative in that kind of environment.

I wonder if that's one of the things we actually miss when we think back to
that simpler time. The unlikelihood of discovering that our inventions had
already been done to death.

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nmstoker
How old is this blog? There's a mysterious absence of any dates on any single
page and even the comments don't have dates/times.

Merely supposition, but the way he talks mainly about 2003/2007 and only
briefly mentions 2010 suggests it was written quite some time ago (I'd hazard
a guess at say 2011). It's on shakier ground to guess based on the Excel
styling but they look distinctly 2005!

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codemac
Dates from the comments on the home page:

    
    
        ; cat excel_source.html | grep datetime | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/datetime="//' | sed -r 's/-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}T.*//' | sort -n | uniq -c
              2 2010
             39 2011
             39 2012
              7 2013
              2 2014
              2 2015
              1 2016
             13 2017
              1 2018
    

I'm gonna bet it's late 2010

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d--b
reminded me of:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeOEQVUWZ0&vl=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeOEQVUWZ0&vl=en)

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GnarfGnarf
Spreadsheets can quickly become horrendously complicated, to the point where
writing a computer program with the same functionality, in a conventional
language, is a whole lot simpler.

Corporations are filled with accountant wannabe programmers who got seduced by
this ersatz programming.

~~~
intended
And corporates also regularly have to buy SaaS moonshine in order to get work
done, and then hire consultants to implement it, and deal with other
consultants when something goes off.

So, Excel is the scratch pad of that world. And it’s good enough for a lot of
the initial scratch work, and at even more complex levels it has the ability
to provide results.

It’s tremendously good for most people, since most people will never be
coders.

I suspect any intelligent civilization will end up with an excel like program
eventually. There’s too much random crap that excel ends up helping many
different kinds of people with.

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Cyclenerd
One of my colleagues is currently developing a gallop simulator in Excel:
[https://galoppsim.racing/gb/](https://galoppsim.racing/gb/)

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rak111esh
Can products such as SmartSheets, Airtable be applications built on
spreadsheets? If yes, after going through some of the comments here, cant help
but think, aren't they regression?

ps:- never used them.

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d33
Lame. Requires liking their Facebook account or tweeting to download. Was
curious if anything would work with LibreOffice.

~~~
iwalton3
You can use this Javascript to bypass the block in the F12 console or a
bookmarklet:

    
    
        document.getElementsByClassName("onp-sl-content")[0].style.display = "block"

