
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? - pg
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'd like to be able to do that you can't currently?  Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
======
asimjalis
Here are some features that would be nice in Excel:

    
    
      1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?).
      2. Online spreadsheets like Google.
      3. Better search and replace.
      4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML.
         Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This
         should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the table pulled
         out of the spreadsheet.
      5. Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example,
         imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it
         was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically.

~~~
kirubakaran
1\. Already doable to a significant extent
<http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+python>

2\. Well, Google does this :)

3\. Follows from 1.

4\. Good idea, but why not just use this:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=spreadsheet+widget>

Or
[http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55244...](http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55244&topic=15170)

5\. Already easily doable in Excel
[http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6115870.h...](http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6115870.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=tr)

In Google Spreadsheet, just use: =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price")

\------

And I hope Google is working on a REPL for Google Docs where you can
interactively run any language on your spreadsheet. :-)

~~~
pg
Actually a repl might be just the thing in a spreadsheet.

~~~
kirubakaran
I just learned that this sort of exists:
[http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/doc/sect-extending-
python...](http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/doc/sect-extending-python-
console.shtml)

[ credit : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430129> ]

------
neilk
1\. Really, really great looking graphs. Excel fails so hard at this it's
unbelievable.

2\. Easy navigation. The giant spreadsheet model is a very simple metaphor but
sometimes I'd like a way to jump to different parts of it more easily.

3\. Not be a spreadsheet. The one-big-sheet model might be better represented
as a bunch of smaller tables floating in space with formulas interconnecting
them. The letter/number convention has been around since the very first
spreadsheet, surely we can do better.

4\. Understand the internet. RSS, live stock quotes, etc. The address of a
cell ought to be internet-compatible somehow, e.g.
<http://myspreadsheets.com/daily_report/C2> or
[http://myspreadsheet.com/daily_report/mynamedtable?x=Jan2007...](http://myspreadsheet.com/daily_report/mynamedtable?x=Jan2007&y=profit).
Google Docs does something like this, I think.

5\. Allow scripting in a language that doesn't completely suck. Javascript or
python would be good choices.

~~~
wizard_2
The newer excels have much much much better graphic capabilities

~~~
apgwoz
But do they adhere to principles preached by Edward Tufte and other data vis
"gods?" (I don't know, I'm asking)

------
CatDancer
Oh my goodness, you're going to get my spreadsheet rant. This is what
frustrates me every single time I use Excel (or the Google Docs spreadsheet,
for that matter).

I may not be answering your question since I'm talking about usability instead
of more powerful features, but I can't but imagine that there'd be a market
for simple and easy to use, even if it turns out it's not going to be
addressed by your particular startup...

I have a table, some data that I've laid out in rows and columns. Something
simple. How much money I've been paid on my invoices to clients, for example,
one invoice per row.

Then I want to sum the column, to get how much I've been paid in total. (Yes,
I'm talking about a very simple spreadsheet. But that's my point, that
something so simple is still messed up!) So I type in a formula: =sum(C2:C10)

Now I add a row, to put in another entry. Does my sum change, to include the
new row? (C2:C11) No, it does not.

So I do not want to be saying sum(C2:C10). I want to say, here is my simple
table, and give me the sum of this column. Which, I don't know what the
language would look like, but if I named my table "invoices" maybe it would be
sum(invoices.C) or sum(invoices.amount) or something.

Every time someone comes out with a new spreadsheet (Excel, OpenOffice, Google
Docs...) I look to see if it is easier to use. Nope! Everyone is too busy
being compatible with the last guy.

~~~
whatusername
You can do most of that (pretty simply) in excel.

For your data C2:C10 - Do a field: sum(C2:C11) Then when you want to add more
data - right-click on the row (11) and "insert" That will update your sum
calculation.

Also - you can do named fields - so that if you select the fields C2:C11 -
then you can name them as "invoices" (in excel 2003 it's in the top left
corner - there's a selection box you can type in. Just select and type a name
in there). The lets you do the command sum(invoices)

Also - don't forget you can do something like sum(C:C) which will just give
you everything in C column..

~~~
CatDancer
_Do a field: sum(C2:C11)_

I.e. leave a blank row at the bottom of my table, and have the sum include
that blank row? I actually know about that trick (thanks :)... what I want is
a spreadsheet that does what I want without my tricking it.

~~~
amobilebiz
You don't have to trick it in Excel 2003. If you have 10 rows (i.e. c1 thru
c10) and in c11 you have the sum if you right click on row 11 and insert row
it will insert a row above 11 and update your formula for you in c11 to
include the new row.

------
jmackinn
I am a huge fan of Excel. It's the program that I use most for doing work.

At the entry user end, there are so many features that are simply unusable or
technically way to difficult. For the power user of Excel, there is very
little that can't be accomplished. It's power is basically limitless with VBA
(or choose your favorite scripting language). Apart from the comment
suggesting larger sizes to the sheets (larger than 1 million rows) and being
online (something that would really not fly in most corporations) I can't find
a problem in here that can't be accomplished with Excel and a firm knowledge
of scripting for it. This may be a cop-out though as you must actually script
the stuff yourself. This, however; is why I love this program so much.

So as for building a more powerful spreadsheet program for the power user
market, it's going to be very hard for anyone to produce something that does
more because it's already basically limitless.

For the novice user though, the program is convoluted, confusing and extremely
limited. The novice user also represents a much bigger market. I have had
several jobs simply because people couldn't do things in Excel that I assumed
a monkey could do. Companies love Excel even though 99% of employees at them
have no idea how to do basic things with it (summing columns for example).
Giving some of the 99% of employees a program that they can do basic to
intermediate things without having the limitless back end scripting power
would put me out of many of my jobs.

Excel at the start is like a country kid visiting the big city for the first
time. There is just way to much power in it and the map for getting around is
far too confusing, but once you've been living there for a while everything
about it becomes a breeze. Making that adjustment easier would be a huge
benefit.

On a side note I enjoy using Google Spreadsheets but one of my top wishes is
that Google, or someone, would implement either a Google scripting language or
a allow for other scripting languages (Ruby, Python, VBA) to be used.

------
aaw
I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for
pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't
pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the
things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:

1\. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a
(name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first
range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A
dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it.

2\. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame"
feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so
they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to
reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the
differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon
for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily.

3\. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference
another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a
lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell
when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It
would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without
having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the
references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out
a tree of formulas would be an improvement.

------
aneesh
Excel is actually a reasonably complete program. That said, I would like to be
able to:

1\. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself
exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially
addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel.

2\. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit).

3\. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet.

4\. Reversibly anonymize data -- if I download some logs with usernames or
IPs, I don't want those in my analysis (I just hide those columns), but I do
need to have a unique identifier for each row. And later get the names back if
I want.

And a couple things I think Excel is great at already:

1\. Making data look pretty. The charts are great, and there's
([http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/defaul...](http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/default.aspx))
for non-power users.

2\. Making data easily portable.

3\. Filtering/sorting data -- VLOOKUP has saved the day so many times.

~~~
timmorgan
1 million rows??? Who wants to scroll through that mess?

~~~
gruseom
No one. But people often have that much data - e.g. from mechanical sources -
that they need to analyze or report on.

------
bd
Are they aware of Resolver One? It's spreadsheet-Python mashup.

<http://www.resolversystems.com>

Sometimes I miss similar type of scripting. With Excel, I often finish copy-
and-pasting raw data into Python string, upon which I then do something
procedural.

------
LogicHoleFlaw
I'm exactly the opposite of your target audience with this question, but
hopefully I can give a useful response anyway :)

I know almost nothing about Excel and it's a deficiency I feel quite keenly.
The program is almost completely undiscoverable to me and I don't even know
where to start with it. I know that there are powerful uses and features of
Excel but the model (or at least the bits of it I've been exposed to) hasn't
clicked for me yet.

I suspect I'm not alone in my bafflement; maybe there is the possibility this
new spreadsheet could be useful to us Excel-ignorant customers who nonetheless
want access to the benefits of this class of software.

 _As a hacker and programmer who is comfortable with all sorts of paradigms I
feel really strange admitting this weakness but I suspect that I'm not the
only one who is in this boat._

~~~
DenisM
Did you try Excel 2007 yet? They dedicated entire release trying to make it
easier for people to get started with Excel (all of Office, really) and then
discover more features as they go along.

------
rms
Queries.

Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.

~~~
notauser
You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas,
and a lot of the rest with pivot tables.

For example, getting the sum bill of every person who lives in England looks
like this in one workbook I have:

{SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))}

(If I want to see, say, the top 10 outstanding bills in England I have to use
a pivot table).

Excels biggest problem is that the workbooks produced with it are really hard
to maintain. Looking at the code above, for example... going back to that
(which is only a trivial example) in a month is going to be pure pain.
Updating data requires cutting and pasting, which can be error prone. Unit
testing is only possible with sample known-good data sets, and copying in new
data tends to make it less than certain that the version you are using is the
same as the one you tested.

Oh, and sharing workbooks between users is really tough. I can usually figure
out other people's Java - but I have yet to be able to reverse engineer a non-
trivial Excel work flow.

~~~
ph0rque
> SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))

Slightly offtopic, but I just wanted to point out that excel syntax looks a
lot like lisp, with biggest different being the first item is outside the
parens.

~~~
herge
Excel: The world's most popular functional programming language.

~~~
khafra
After searching for a decent reverse polish calculator for the iPhone for
months, I finally realized that a spreadsheet app fits the bill there as well.

------
jblondon
1\. It should be possible to turn a sheet into a function. So I can then
define my own 'inputs' and 'outputs' for that sheet, and 'call' it with
whatever parameters I like from another sheet. Sure it can be done in code,
but for building large, maintainable models that's not practical.

2\. 'Hard' and 'Soft' numbers (i.e., numbers I manually enter vs. numbers that
are the result of a formulae) should be automatically coloured accordingly if
I want them to be. Manually plugging in a number on top of a formula should
not necessarily over-write the formula. It's quite common I want to preserve
the logic but 'hack in' a variable. Instead, it's either or (and I have to
copy/paste the formula into a comment for the cell, which is a pain and clumsy
as hell).

3\. Track changes.

4\. Non-euclidean topology ... by which I mean, making it possible to vary the
number of colums / rows and column / row sizes within a single sheet.

------
smanek
An 'inner join' would be nice.

A few years ago I worked at a large financial consulting firm, and I was
amazed at how often accountants would implement what basically amounted to an
'inner join' using nested iteration over columns in vba.

This was a few versions of Excel ago, so I don't know if this feature is
available in recent versions or not. I imagine not, since then Excel would
really start to encroach on Access's domain.

------
zain
Automatic versioning and version control.

~~~
DenisM
Did you try Sharepoint? It does versioning, version control and a bit of
collaboration for Excel.

~~~
Tangurena
Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't
answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the
formula in E5 been wrong?"

Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of
money and time.

~~~
DenisM
You can diff two versions against each other.

Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?

~~~
Tangurena
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I
don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do.

When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real
code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard
is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from
another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6.
It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with
cut & paste.

Two sample foul ups: [http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-
Spreadsheet....](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-
Spreadsheet.aspx) [http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-
Spreadsheet.as...](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-
Spreadsheet.aspx)

I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes
(as well as seen one old employer's code on that site).

Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present,
and who changed it when. Something like.

~~~
sokoloff
In revision control systems, the "Who changed this line last and when?" is
called "blame", so in fact, you are looking for "blame". :)

------
nrao123
I have not read all the comments since there are too many of them. Here is my
wish list(I am an ex- Mgmt consultant) without knowing if its already covered
in the comments: 1) Creating a new tab/sheet and choosing if the tab should be
a document or spreadsheet type so that I can run my numbers once and reference
my table in the document and not worry about cutting and pasting. Really helps
reduce word document and report writing. This is a fundamential mind set shift
as an excel spreadsheet hardly goes on its own. Its always accompanied by a
document and syncing the numbers between the report/tables and the excel is a
massive PITA. 2) Importing some functionality of Access (running unique/group
by queries, inner join/outer join etc...) in Excel. Helps me run complex data
queries while maintaining data integrity. 3) A wiki like online spreadsheet.
(dont think Google Docs does this. For e.g. if we are running a valuation for
a company and each team mate has different assumptions for each variables,
this can help team mates input thier assumptions and track it and see the
overall impact on the numbers. Instead of the current model of emailing
spreadsheets back and forth or erasing new data over old ones (e.g. like
Google Spreadsheets). Btw- I strongly believe just implementing this last
point alone and narrowly defining yourself as a model builder (with wiki like
enterprise capabilites) would generate strong traction in I-Banks, Buy side
firms, sell side research firms, market research companies, mgmt consulting
firms, insurance companies etc...

Would love to try out a beta version if available. my email is raonikhilesh
"@" gmail

------
anamax
Instead of "new, more powerful spreadsheet", how about providing spreadsheet
interface for a relational database?

Of course, if you want it to be successful, you need to be able to import
Excel spreadsheets as is, including macros and formula, and you also may need
to maintain the linking to/from other microsoft artifacts.

~~~
jaxn
Set the Excel Spreadsheet to pull from a remote data source using ODBC.

That gives the added security of allowing people to play with the data without
changing the data in the database.

~~~
anamax
But you want them to be able to manipulate the data from Excel.

There is a spreadsheet interface metaphor. Parts of it are quite useful. Other
parts are less convenient given the ways that people program/use spreadsheets.
Some of them are better addressed with parts of the database metaphor.

------
imp
Smart conversions. If I have a graph of something in Celsius, I have to copy
the data, edit it, and create a new graph just to convert it to Fahrenheit.
Same with any other unit of measurement. When I was an engineer my biggest
gripe with Excel was that it didn't know anything about my data.

------
crsmith
Freeze multiple, unconnected columns and rows.

That way I could view the descriptions at the top and the sums at the bottom
while I'm scrolling through any point in a spreadsheet.

------
mlinsey
Excel doesn't work well on very large spreadsheets (I use it on some sheets
with over 150,000 rows.) Things are slow to load, and commands like lookups
are extremely slow, enough that I think they're doing O(n) lookups for things
like the VLOOKUP command, even when looking up data on tables or sorted
columns.

What makes the above even worse is that Excel has a pretty poor understanding
of when a change necessitates a re-calculation of all values in the workbook,
so I grind to a halt when making random unrelated changes (and even if I
switch it to manual calculations, it re-calculates upon saving, meaning saving
my work can become a 30-40 minute endeavor).

Pivot tables are pretty clunky an unintuitive for most users, even though I
think lots of people would use them if they understood what they were.

VBA is a very verbose and inelegant language, and there are lots of operations
which are called in totally different ways than the analagous forumulas in the
spreadsheet. There are even some things you can do in spreadsheets which don't
have an analagous VBA command, which leads to the fantastic work-around of
using cells on your worksheet instead of variables and changing their text
values to the command you really want to just run in VBA.

The standard fill down operation sometimes doesn't Just Work(TM). Example: say
you want to make a cell "=C2 _E5". You try filling down and you get "=C3_ E6",
when you wanted "=C3 _E5", because E5 is a constant. OK, fair enough, you say,
you can't reasonably expect the machine to infer what you meant. But now you
adjust the cell below to what you want, and now you select two cells, one
that's "=C2_ E5", one right below it that is now "=C3 _E5", and now with both
selected, you fill down again. Presto, the next cells are "=C4_ E7","=C5
_E7","=C6_ E9","=C7 _E9","=C8_ E11".... etc. That's pretty bad.

Some of these are pretty mundane, but they would all be big deals for me.

~~~
parbo
Use $ to keep copy/fill from autoincrementing. $E$5

------
lallysingh
One thing nice about Numbers is that you don't worry about cells as an
absolute coordinate system. Each table's unique, and you can add/remove rows
without hitting everything else.

So, in a word, encapsulation.

Also, the line between databases & spreadsheets is fairly thin, how about some
relational calculus? Some import/export with SQL? Or a query language?

------
pasbesoin
diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae,
cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting
recognition of intracell text formatting.

Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then
the data format and API's will be less... obtuse.

Interactive, visual interface to same diff functionality.

When I last looked, for Excel there was a product or two going partway in this
direction; however, most seemed rather limited, e.g. export the cell contents
to text and diff that.

Useful for number crunchers. Also useful for all the people who end up using
something like Excel as a glorified table. In the business world, there are
endless use cases of people managing documents, requirements, results, etc. in
Excel. Providing such a "BeyondCompare" fucntionality for this content would
be very useful to a lot of them, (Caution: You might also have to teach them
how to use it, including the diff concept. And that could be a very
significant bump to try to get over.)

Since Excel is so dominant, that class of people might not be your target
market. Nonetheless, I see a good diff type utility as being a real plus.

I also can agree with Zain's comment regarding versioning support.

And, integrated regexp support. I wedged same in to Excel/VBA by defining a
reference to Windows Scripting Host (back in 1999 or 2000). Very useful. A lot
of problems people deal with in spreadsheets can be greatly aided by decent
pattern matching and substitution.

------
boucher
I think something that google has begun to do, and that is incredibly
valuable, is data "sources" that aren't hard coded into any particular
spreadsheet, but that come from a URL or API of some kind.

I should be able to make a row of "oil prices by month since 2005" that
updates on its own. Or a cell with "current value of the DOW".

~~~
ctkrohn
There are plenty of third-party plugins that do this -- Bloomberg and Reuters
have them, for example. For example, the formula for the current level of the
Dow Jones Industrial average is =blp("INDU Index","LAST_PX"). The equivalent
Reuters formula is something like =RtGet(".INDU","PXLAST"). At work I have a
sheet which pulls in real-time prices on Treasury bonds, interest rate swaps,
options, stocks, futures, mortgage-backed securities, etc. and organizes them
all into nice tables and charts. It's built on the Bloomberg and Reuters APIs.

------
thorax
Best ideas I have here:

* Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets.

* Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull in other people's spreadsheets across the world to use as one of your cells (somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, I suppose)

* Alternatively, I'd like to see Excel go three dimensional for a single sheet. At a minimum perhaps use "layers" like Photoshop would to apply transformations and adaptations that collapse into the final view.

* I'd prefer this imaginary Excel also use Python or JavaScript for cell programming/calculations.

* I second the versioning information idea, too-- keep a history of every manual change to every cell and allow them to be reverted. In a git-esque way, support branching of cells, etc.

------
andr
65,000.

(that's the maximum number of rows in Excel before 2007). I'd like something
similar to SPSS, which is more convenient for tables with lots of rows and
separates the data from the formulae.

A tool for working with streaming data.

Also, charting that works for large amounts data. Try having Excel chart
65,000 rows and you'll have time to make coffee while you wait. There are no
ways to zoom or analyze Excel charts, either.

In fact, charting for data analysis alone is a big enough problem that needs
solving (and you won't have to do all that catching up with Excel). Short of
using HTML/Flash or .NET/Java components, there is nothing an enterprise
worker can use. Get access to a Bloomberg terminal from somewhere and play
with its charts to see what I mean.

~~~
DenisM
Take a look at SQL Server Reporting Services.

It's a charting and reporting tool over SQL Server (and I thinkg any other
ODBC/OLEDB source), it works over large datasets, has both Web UI and desktop
UI, and comes in the box with SQL Server itself.

FD: I work in SQL Server, athough not on Reporting Services. FWIW, Reporting
is a huge success with our customers.

~~~
jaxn
It is also available as a free download for developers to try it out and learn
/ test.

I have used SQL Reporting Services as well as Business Objects tools and I am
pretty impressed with the latest releases from MS.

------
nadim
Some thoughts:

-With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there.

-Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, and maybe even restricting access within worksheets within the document.

------
prakash
Is it aimed at any particular domain? Finance folks pretty much live in excel,
they might make a good use-case on what can't be done or what they don't like
in excel.

Slides 4 & 5 give some insight: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/2191289/yaron-
minskycufp-2006>

While I am not a big user of excel, the google docs version of excel is very
similar to the desktop version + collaboration (think Oddpost). The other
approach taken by some people I have spoken with is viewing it more as _data_
and tying to do more (think gmail to some extent).

------
ecommercematt
In no particular order, here are some desirable features:

1) Version control. 2) Access restrictions and permissions. BONUS:
Responsibilities, a la Siebel and other CRMs. 3) Simple drag and drop
manipulation of data, such as concatenation. 4) Wufoo-like ease with building
data entry forms. 5) Dummy data mode, so you can get help with customizing a
complicated spreadsheet without revealing sensitive data. 6) Example use cases
for sophisticated features, with well-written instructions, INOW a good, non-
linear tutorial.

------
abc3
I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user
experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with
Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:

<http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google>

The thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns,
specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors
are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings,
instead of through websites like Gurufocus.

For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman:

<http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman>

You can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC
Info:

<http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt>

Clearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely
available SEC filings
([http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/000106176808000206/acn3q08.txt))
into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than
I'd like.

------
skmurphy
The fundamental problem is that Excel forces a novice (and actually everyone)
to work at a level of detail such that key elements of the plan or analysis
are lost in a forest of low level code. I would focus on the novice because it
will be hard to get power users to switch. Letting a user pick a range or
distribution for an input instead of a specific value will help to avoid
anchoring around the "one right answer."

Compare two spreadsheet highlighting changes more intelligently than Excel's.
For example, allow for a more intentional representation of

    
    
       decisions/numbers/inputs: control variable
       relationships/rules: system representation
       outputs/results: state variable
    

Track changes to indicate if inputs or rules/relationships changed, optionally
ignore output changes

Allow for a set of input variables (and optionally some rules) to be defined
as a scenario to compare differences between scenarios. Also, let an input
variable be a distribution or an interval and the scenario specify any
covariances.

Scenario planning and decision trees: a graphical view that can switch to a
traditional spreadsheet view and vice versa.

EDIT
[http://www.google.com/search?q="next+generation+spreadsheet"](http://www.google.com/search?q=)
turns up some interesting ideas as well.

------
RK
Decent looking plots.

If I'm going to make a scatter plot style plot for anything besides an
internal memo (even an internal presentation) I always plot with something
else.

------
anamax
(1) Optional Fortress like "typing". It's almost always a mistake to add a
number representing an amount of dollars to a number referring to feet. And
feet can't be added to meters. Heck, it's typically wrong to add gigabytes to
megabytes without a conversion (which depends on whether you're talking about
disk space or ram).

(2) Many of the complaints mentioned come from the way that a given entity,
"the sheet" (or page) is used to both computation and to present multiple
computations. Rethinking that is likely to yield huge benefits.

(3) It should be possible to tag computations so they can be more easily used
to build other computations. For example, I was recently doing some cost
analysis and realized part way through that I'd like to break down the numbers
in other ways. Since I was using a sequence of equations in an ordinary
programming language, it was easy enough to define appropriate accumulators
and pick up the values from the equations, but it would have been a pain with
a spreadsheet. And, my solution was too granular.

I'm not expressing (3) very well, but I think that it's a big deal, so feel
free to contact me.

------
iigs
Disclaimer: not particularly a power user. Problem also probably more of a
UI/UX issue than a technical issue.

From time to time when I'm working in excel I'll find I've derived an answer
from a couple adjacent input cells and several intermediate calculation step
cells below. As a contrived example, lets say I have pennies per number of
hours and I want to convert to dollars per year. I'll start with hours per
year (365.25*24) and divide that by the input "number of hours". Then I'll
divide the input "number of pennies" by 100 to get dollars. Then I'll multiply
the two together to get my output.

Without fail after working through a problem like this I will want to make a
2-D grid with an input variable on each axis and have the results filled into
the grid. Unfortunately because I just did it using a bunch of intermediate
cells I can't copy and paste, drag and fill, or any of the other intuitive
mechanisms. To date the only solution I've found to this problem is to re-do
all of my work in VBA as a single function and use =myFn(colval,rowval) in
each cell.

There are a couple ways this could play out. One of which would be to call
subordinate sheets (or chunks of sheets) as functions. This is how I've
envisioned it in my head. It would be a terrible pain to make that work, and
I'd be afraid it would confuse people who wouldn't understand which cells
worked normally and which cells were function components.

Another solution would be to select an output cell and have it refactor it to
a function that could be called. This is probably a lot easier to do, but
might not be as maintainable by the kinds of people that don't understand VBA
-- they could keep the "source code" cells around and recompile when changes
are made, but all of the standard code generator / manual edit problems apply.

------
egl
You can't tell whether you got the right answer.

My rule of thumb is that any interesting spreadsheet has a mistake. Anyone who
uses a spreadsheet and doesn't independently know the answer "close enough" is
living in a fool's paradise.

------
c1sc0
Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and
'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of
biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something
that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be
accessed by us computational types.

------
micks56
I have to use old software databases at my engineering job. The only way to
get the data out of the system is to show it on the screen 1 at a time or to
print it out. I would love for this new spreadsheet to pretend to be a printer
and have the data piped directly to my spreadsheet instead of my pdf printer.

~~~
gruseom
Upvoted for the craziest bad-ass suggestion in the whole thread.

~~~
micks56
Thanks.

Every engineering company I have worked at had these legacy databases. They
all allow you to enter information (not very well), see the information on
your screen, or send a report to the printer.

Piping data to a spreadsheet is something almost everyone in the companies I
work with (I am a consultant) could do. These aren't sophisticated users. Even
the ones with recent EE degrees aren't programming in their spreadsheets. The
Mechanical Engineers don't even know that you can.

What they do need is tools to analyze the data existing in these large
databases. Switching to another database/interface is not an option.

To extend my original idea: Excel has a way to import data from a text file.
It works ok. Select your field delimiter, etc. What would be awesome is if I
could draw my own macro on the screen. Make it more powerful. Excel shows me
how my input data will work in the spreadsheet. Do that, but give me more
editing tools.

Here is why: the data coming out of these databases to the printer is
structured. Every record looks the same. If I can draw what one case looks
like all of my data will be entered to the spreadsheet correctly.

I know I am not explaining this well, but if anyone (including the YC group)
wants me to elaborate further I will.

I would pay for a spreadsheet that has these 2 features. A large part of my
job is analyzing data in my customer's database. I can provide my customer
with more value if the data input to spreadsheet is trivial as opposed to me
billing for several hours performing the task by hand.

------
gcanyon
As others have written, some of the things I've longed for in Excel are found
in Numbers -- they're also available in Ragtime: the ability to place multiple
spreadsheets independently in a single document and work on full ranges within
them. Ragtime adds rotation of spreadsheet objects.

I prefer lightweight databases to spreadsheets, so my suggestions would be
similar to what FileMaker says:
<http://www.filemaker.com/articles/database/new_database.html>

In short: make it easy to present a set of information through different
views, make it easy to share between users, make it easy to create and
maintain complex data structures and validation. Presenting information from
the spreadsheet through the web, with or without edit capability, would be
good.

------
pingswept
This minor, but:

A round() function that isn't stupid, i.e. it rounds to a certain number of
significant figures, rather than relative to the decimal point. Workarounds
exist, but I want a no-work-around.

I suppose it's not a problem worthy of very smart programmers, but it still
makes me wish for bullets-over-SMTP.

------
frig
Quantrix is already a better excel and look how well they're doing for
themselves (or not).

But seriously: take a gander at quantrix, rip off its features, slap yourself
on the back for innovating, and go home.

Edit: the above is perhaps a bit too snarky to be helpful.

As a "power spreadsheet user" I moved on from excel to quantrix; this is
something I can get away with b/c I'm not stifled with a closet full of
legacy, mission-critical excel spreadsheets.

Quantrix is pretty much at the sweet spot of spreadsheet functionality: it's
possible to imagine a more-powerful and more-general-purpose tool, but taking
it even a little further would turn it into something not really a spreadsheet
any more...you'd wind up back at R.

You'll find in Quantrix a mature, well-thought, and all-around "better excel".

------
Spyckie
1.) automatic smart chart creation - the spreadsheet guesses the kind of data
I'm inputting and builds a chart on the fly.

2.) UI that values datasets over data points, or some sort of functionality
that defines a dataset. Since most tasks deal with sets as a whole (and not
individual points) this would result in a much cleaner, quicker interface.
Also, you could start treating a dataset like a black box instead of a TON of
cells with meaningless value, and thereby gain access to a lot of shortcuts
not possible currently. This should allow easy data entry, dataset searching,
and will keep all your scripting in your view. Best of all, there's no need to
manipulate cells at all with a dataset approach.

------
nx
Excel is Turing-complete :P

~~~
eru
Turing-Machines are Turing-complete, too.

~~~
nx
O RLY?

~~~
eru
To make my point explicit: Excel being Turing-complete does not imply it being
feature-complete.

~~~
nx
I know. It was a joke, thus the ":P", and so was the "O RLY?". But maybe the
emoticon wasn't clear enough and I should've added an interrobang there?
Anyway, thanks for the -10 karma points.

BTW, I do my spreadsheets with a Von Neumann derivate of a finite state
automaton.

~~~
eru
Perhaps "O RLY?" was not witty enough?

~~~
GHFigs

      HAI
      CAN HAS STDIO?
      I HAS A WITTEH
      I HAS A KARMA
      
      IZ WITTEH BIGGER THAN "O RLY"?
        YARLY
          UP KARMA!!1
        NOWAI
          DOWN KARMA!!1
        KTHX
      KTHXBYE
    
      BTW "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."
      BTW http://lolcode.com/

------
kul
Excel on the Mac really sucks and I don't really want to install Windows just
for that.

------
IanYorston
Worth a quick look at ThinkDigits for iPhone.

<http://ignitedsoftware.com/products/thinkdigits/>

------
colinplamondon
Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything.

------
vzn
I would like to have mind mapping (like <http://www.mindjet.com/>) right
inside excel (as well as for other office applications) but it should be
tightly integrated. It seems to me such type functionality might be useful for
data crunching and modeling with full brain thinking. Spreadsheets enable only
logical half of brain so there is room for improvement.

------
sebg
As someone who works in an investment bank, it would be great if this new,
more powerful spreadsheet played nicely with Bloomberg, Reuters, and Factset.

------
brent
I do not use Excel regularly and I thus am certainly not a power user.
However, I would think scripting for plots would be useful (like I do in
matlab or matplotlib) for repetitive, highly configured, high quality plots
with the ability to easily export them as ps or pdf. This may very well be
possible now (and I'm just ignorant), but that would be one thing that would
be handy that I have not seen.

------
ken
Separation of data, formulas, and graphs (a la MVC). It shouldn't be a mystery
to me whether a number is data I've entered, or a result of a computation.

It should also have a real solver, so I don't have to work out formulas on
paper first. If I can type in some equations (legibly) and it's possible to
derive the data I want from the data and formulas I've given, then just do it.

(I understand Lotus Improv got this right. In fact, from what I've read about
it, Lotus Improv got many things right. A modern clone of Improv would be
cool.)

Also, it should know units. If my search engine can do unit conversions on the
fly, my spreadsheet ought to be able to.

Better graphing. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but every time I try to
make a graph in a spreadsheet, I end up with something that doesn't look at
all like I wanted.

N.B., I've basically given up on spreadsheets. For lists, I use an outliner.
For simple math, I use a HLL like Ruby or Lisp or Octave. I suspect if there
was an OmniOutliner for Windows, Excel would die overnight.

------
mwexler
One interesting model of where spreadseets may go is Resolver, at
<http://code.google.com/p/resolver/> or <http://www.resolversystems.com/>.
Most of the issues complained about here can be solved through the Python back
end.

~~~
gruseom
It seems to be an elegant tool. But as I see it, it deviates from the core
value of spreadsheets, which is putting computing power in the hands of non-
programmers. Most spreadsheet users will balk at learning Python.

------
knectar
I worked in a consulting firm that had built its entire business on Excel
"apps", heavy, clever VBA-driven rich GUI interface spreadsheets applications
that were replicated time the number of people in the client organization.
While a bit wonky, and web-naive in way, these app's proved to be surprisingly
resilient and flexible for "lowly" Excel (lowly only in the hierarchy of
"legit" programming environments). From this experience, I would say that what
would have been a profoundly useful tool, would be a software conversion tool,
that could capture some of the logic, or UI of such "apps" and webify them, or
at least convert some of the syntax into better object oriented code. This is
of course a tall order, if not impossible. The dream of automating quality
code may be nigh impossible, but it would be a huge business value even if
executed only in part.

------
lisper
<http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt>

------
khafra
The ability to do regex matches to cells, not just full exact text with a case
sensitive/insensitive option.

------
nailer
A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before.

findincolumn('john',a) scrollaccross(3) retrievedata

------
ph0rque
3d plotting.

------
rstonge
SQL queries would be really good. I have been in many situations where I would
like to do a simple query on a large spreadsheet and can't so I have to resort
to programming. Most of the time it is not worth the effort, so I don't
bother. This feature would be a big help.

------
jderick
I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL
file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or
multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the
ability to import that same format.

------
misterbwong
Excel's core functionality is great, but many of its extended functions are
hard to use and/or limited. In addition to adding functionality, you could
revamp some of the functions that excel currently doesn't do well. My list
would be:

1\. Multi-user experience - Better workbook sharing and editing.

2\. Better scripting (already mentioned above)

3\. More than 65536 rows!

4\. Queries/Lookups - It may be that I'm not proficient enough, but it seems
like VLOOKUP and pivot tables can be done A LOT better.

FYI our old company was considering buying a product to extend excel
functionality. Probably a possible competitor. Check it out:
<http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/xcelsius/>

------
bootload
_"... In the long term, it is unlikely that any particular ASP will survive
without you needing to migrate your data to something else. ... The issue you
bring up, of how do you deal with the fact that it is unlikely most ASPs will
be around to maintain your data, is a good one. It should be discussed and
careful attention should be paid to it. Your suggestion to go with ones that
have the most partners and customers (VisiCalc's situation in its day) doesn't
fit with your comparison to staying away from VisiCalc. ..."_

From the man (Dan Bricklin) himself ~
<http://www.bricklin.com/nextvisicalc.htm>

------
jodrellblank
An interactive shell (Python, with Excel objects and helper methods ready
provided).

------
compay
Export to quote-qualified CSV.

------
mattmcknight
I think something that mixes structured and tabular data together would be
great. If you had a worksheet style "dynamically typed" structure that was
supplemented by some structured tables of data that could be easily referenced
and updated by Excel style formulas, it would be very useful. In this way the
spreadsheet sits as a layer on top of several database tables that can be
shared between users. I sort of imagine the ultra-flexible spreadsheet on one
monitor and this floating collection of data tables on the other one. It's a
hybrid.

------
niels_olson
Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very
long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the
CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559

~~~
yters
Does R Commander fit your needs?

<http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/>

~~~
niels_olson
not even close. That was a quick slap-together for an undergrad class. And the
look and feel is just painful. SPSS would be a better model.

------
unalone
I'm not a big spreadsheet person, but I'd throw in aesthetics to the mix. I
love Numbers when I have to use it, much more than I like Excel. Even though
it's weaker, the looks more than make up for it.

------
swombat
Hmm, I've seen some pretty hair-raising stuff done with Excel already... I
don't think we need to _increase_ its capabilities any further. It's an
extremely powerful piece of software already.

------
GHFigs
An alternative question might be: what are you doing in Excel today for which
Excel was not intended?

I remember Wil Shipley (of Omni, Delicious Monster) talking about how they
originally developed OmniOutliner after noticing that most people were using
Excel to make simple lists rather than complex spreadsheets, so there was a
market for something less expensive than Excel and more tailored to the things
people were actually doing with it. With a product as broadly installed as
Excel I'm sure there's still under-served niches.

------
chris_l
For conventional programming I've been working on laying the logic out as a
graph automatically. Instead of cryptic formulas in the cells, you would have
an easy to understand graph that shows how information is related and
computed. In addition the intermediate results for selected input values could
be shown next to the nodes and links, to allow inspection of the computation.

This could be adapted for the spreadsheet concept. Actually, it might be more
appropriate there.

------
PoweredByWill
OLE is a joke, if this is a client-side application add embeddable spreadsheet
widgets.

Pivot-tables would be nice as a core function to model data (see quantrix.com)

Make 'light databases' part of the architecture and not counter-design.
something like, spreadsheets meets csv with a cli query component or similar.

------
jherdman
I want access to whatever data is inside the spreadsheet. Currently Excel
locks away your data unless you use a library of some sort that may not
necessarily be 100% accurate, or capable of a specific feature.

Likewise, generating spreadsheets should be easy for 3rd parties.

------
vincentvwyl
Instead of the programming angle, I would like a user-interface that works for
right-brained people and doesn't drive you bonkers after spending more than a
few hours on it. That would be a blue ocean in the world of spreadsheets.

------
MaysonL
Have it interface with Fluidinfo.com. [which should be going alpha sometime
soon]

------
gsiener
FWIW, I would often query a database and make completely de-normalized
datasets that I'd paste into Excel. Then I would pivot the crap out of them
and figure out how I wanted to slice the data...

------
kirubakaran
Emacs key bindings please.

~~~
apgwoz
Maybe a better contribution would have been to say, "highly customizable
keyboard navigation, to make using it mouseless possible"

~~~
kirubakaran
I agree.

------
critic
They must be very good, if they are expected to come up with something within
a few months that will be able to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office
and Open Office.

I can't wait to see it.

------
markessien
Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube.

~~~
jaxn
like an OLAP viewer?

------
rokhayakebe
Support videos/images. Edit: as well as audio/video comments.

------
code_devil
1\. create a Table and then have an option to create the corresponding mySQL.
(Relation DB Design)

2\. create a mySQL Dump from the Table Data.

3\. Other cool MySQL Optimizations.

------
nailer
I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a
dictionary in a cell.

------
timae
I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get
GoogleChartsAPI url".

That'd be sweet.

------
JeffL
I would like to do conditional formatting on one column based on the contents
of another column.

~~~
yters
Can't you do this by making your conditional format for a cell dependent on
another column, and then use the format for all cells in the column?

------
jlouis
Perhaps, one could gather up some good ideas from Ken Tiltons 'cells' system
for Common Lisp?

~~~
sctb
My understanding of Cells what that it is a dataflow system that handles
calculation graphs for some kind of formula. I doubt that it has any insight
into user workflows in an actual spreadsheet application.

------
ctingom
Look at ASAP Utilities.

------
Vitriol
Please do pivot tables

------
ph0rque
ability to recurse.

~~~
dmoney
Recursion is fun, but how would you use it in a spreadsheet?

~~~
RK
Changing values in place?

A1 = 0.1*A1

Can be useful if you need to convert values, etc., but don't want to create an
entire new row/column

