
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017) - danso
Was just Googling around for whether Excel (sans VBA scripting of course) is Turing-complete, in order to decide whether telling a layperson that Excel (or spreadsheeting in general) can be considered very much like programming. Came across this 2009 HN thread, &quot;Ask HN: What can&#x27;t you do in Excel?&quot; from pg:<p>&gt; One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you&#x27;d like to be able to do that you can&#x27;t currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=429477<p>What significant advances -- in Excel&#x2F;spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What&#x27;s the YC startup from that cycle that &quot;is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet&quot;, and what is it doing today? I remember Grid [0], but that was from 2012. Any other companies make innovations that would overturn the spreadsheet paradigm, or at least be copied by Excel&#x2F;OO&#x2F;GSheets?<p>A commenter mentioned &quot;Queries&quot;, since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses &quot;principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) to do searches). The function has been around since 2015 (according to Internet Archive [2]) so perhaps I ignored it because its description then was simply, &quot;Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data.&quot;<p>It appears that &quot;Visualization API Query Language&quot; has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].<p>edit: Multiple people said they would like Excel to have online functionality, i.e. like Google Sheets, but being able to accept VBA and any other features of legacy Excel spreadsheets. There&#x27;s now Excel Online but I haven&#x27;t used it (still sticking to Office 2011 for Mac if I ever need to use Excel instead of GS). How seamless is the transition from offline, legacy Excel files to online Excel?<p>[0] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the&#x2F;<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;answer&#x2F;3093343?hl=en<p>[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150319144449&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;answer&#x2F;3093343?hl=en<p>[3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;chart&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;docs&#x2F;querylanguage
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alok-g
Topological sort on cells based on formula references.

Excel sheets are often highly convoluted in cell cross-references in formulas.
It would help to have a clean-up mechanism that performs a topological sort on
all the cells with formulas and puts them in a more natural order. It would
help to be able to identify the backward references even if the cells are not
automatically rearranged.

~~~
westurner
+1 for Topological sort of formulas (e.g. into a Jupyter notebook; as e.g.
Python)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_use_python_for_statistical_analysis/ciyf3v3)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/imp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/improving_your_excel_skills_can_definitely_help/c84lr6x)

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bayangan
If we're talking Microsoft Excel; I want baked in regex support. It bugs me
having to copy over my module each time I need it. I default to using Google
Sheets if I don't need charts.

~~~
intended
Holy _€}^_ {%}€ yes.

God the amount of times data cleaning and comparison fails in excel because
collapsing names or identifying sets is not doable is annoying.

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PaulHoule
The real data structure for financial reporting and analysis is
hyperdimensional, like it or not:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL)

After a 15 year struggle, digital financial reports are a success in the U.S
and the Europeans are following up.

\---

Also, many people use a spreadsheet when they really want a database. In the
office world that would be Access instead of Excel; I like the idea of Access
but the implementation is an uncomfortable place of having a complex GUI and
having to know some SQL.

\---

Finally, decimal arithmetic. Financial calculations should not have the
artifacts that come from trying to represent (1/100)th in base 2.

~~~
westurner
W3C RDF Data Cubes (qb:)

[https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-
engineerin...](https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-
engineering.html#rdf-data-cubes)

> RDF Data Cubes vocabulary is an RDF standard vocabulary for expressing
> linked multi-dimensional statistical data and aggregations.

> Data Cubes have dimensions, attributes, and measures

> Pivot tables and crosstabulations can be expressed with RDF Data Cubes
> vocabulary

And then SDMX is widely used internationally:

[https://github.com/pandas-
dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecommen...](https://github.com/pandas-
dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecomment-26689558)

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brudgers
To me, the question sort of misses why (I believe) people use Excel instead of
something else. I think people use Excel for all the things that are missing
from other spreadsheets. Google gives away its spreadsheet and markets it to
everyone with a Gmail account and makes it easy to use and people still pay
for Excel because the cost of the missing features outweighs the price of the
paid software.

Sure there are people who will express dissatisfaction with Excel. And many
many use cases for which Google's product is good enough. But it is all the
edge cases that Excel covers that makes it viable to standardize upon across a
user base where some users have a significant level of expertise and that
expertise is diverse.

To put it another way, free and available anywhere and easy collaboration are
all great features. But they are not enough. Killer features will only become
killer once a spreadsheet does pretty much everything Excel does (and in
pretty much the way Excel does it so that muscle memory works).

~~~
joehan
I don't work in tech industry but from my experience it's a lot simpler than
that. Most of these day-to-day desk workers know nothing but excel because
that's all they know from home and work.

~~~
brudgers
I agree that most people just default to Excel. Mostly that's because there
isn't really any competition and Excel is the default and even if there was
competition, it would not matter because Excel has a low initial cost except
when compared with free.

More subtly, Excel has a low lifetime cost because there are many good
learning resources (and also many bad ones) and those resources are widely
available. Which makes me think that one of the killer features of Excel is
all the technical headroom it provides for solving problems...by which I mean
there is usually functionality and features that could make an ordinary job
faster...particularly repetitive ordinary jobs of the sort most people wind up
doing.

------
chrispsn
Power Query, aka Get & Transform (built into Excel 2016), is probably the best
new feature since Excel Tables were introduced in v2007. It lets you pull data
from local, network and web sources - including databases - with a relatively
easy UI. The queries can also be refreshed.

My main complaint about spreadsheets (or at least Excel) is: you can't
generate data of arbitrary length via a formula and display it on the grid
without manually managing the cells it takes up. An example where this would
be handy is an array formula for unique items.

It seems that maintaining location-based referencing as a feature (referring
to data based on cell location, eg '=A1') makes this difficult to implement.

Power Query allows this via List.Generate and the M language, but you need to
break the spreadsheet auto-calculation paradigm to use it.

This is why Mesh exists:
[https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh](https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh)

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rhkk
R Data frame like data type, Excel tables get pretty close but not quite as
nice

Storing internal data without making it visible in a sheet

Code interpreter, R/Python style

More readily available statistical functions

Better plotting options

Packages/Package manager

Basically I want more R and Python functionality native to Excel

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westurner
Linked Data.

> [...] 7 metadata header rows (column label, property URI path, DataType,
> unit, accuracy, precision, significant figures)

[https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...](https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv-
csvw-and-metadata-rows)

Specifically, CSVW JSONLD as a lossless output format.

CSVW supports physical units.

[https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096](https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096)

> "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" (#JSONLD, #RDFa HTML) is
> for Data on the Web #dwbp #linkeddata [https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-
> model/](https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/)

> #CSVW defaults to xsd:string if unspecified. "How do you support units of
> measure?" #qudt [https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of-
> measure](https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of-measure)

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2_listerine_pls
-Linked Cells: A = B, If Cell A changes Cell B updates, and viceversa.

-Linked Cells by a formula: A = 2B, you change one the other updates.

-Key columns. Auto-increment columns. Unique rows.

-Auto-generate forms for input.

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qubex
I want Lotus Improv's features and philosophy back (particularly the
separation between visualisation, input numbers, and formulae acting
thereupon).

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terminalcommand
I'd like Excel to have built-in .net scripting support. Imagine being able to
code excel macros in F#.

~~~
limeblack
Quite a while ago I called Excel via NETLink using Mathematica. There should
still be a COM interface link for excel.

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beamatronic
A built in headless scriptable browser / a full http client with optional
cookie store.

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j_s
First-class source control / versioning.

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anotheryou
It' turing complete, no? ;) (google it)

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geezerjay
Audit Excel spreadsheets.

