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Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017)

37 points by danso ↗ HN
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, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?" from 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477

What significant advances -- in Excel/spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What's the YC startup from that cycle that "is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet", 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/OO/GSheets?

A commenter mentioned "Queries", since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses "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, "Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data."

It appears that "Visualization API Query Language" has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].

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's now Excel Online but I haven'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?

[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the/

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150319144449/https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en

[3] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage

24 comments

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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

beamatronic
A built in headless scriptable browser / a full http client with optional cookie store.
qubex
I want Lotus Improv's features and philosophy back (particularly the separation between visualisation, input numbers, and formulae acting thereupon).
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.

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

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.

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qubex
In a other comment I have suggested that the author of the original post look at Lotus Improv (and Quantrix Modeler, two spreadsheets from the nineties that were way ahead of their time for keeping data and formulae distinct. This obviates the need for topological sorting as described because the dataflow aspect of the sheet being worked on is always very explicit and clear.
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.

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

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
Linked Data.

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

https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...

Specifically, CSVW JSONLD as a lossless output format.

CSVW supports physical units.

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/

> #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

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

tixocloud
Agreed. The thing about Excel isn't about the features. It's about the adoption across pretty every company in the world. It's in schools and it's used at work. When people become proficient in a tool, they are less willing to learn a whole new tool to accomplish basically the same thing Excel can. They will just ask the company to buy Excel. And it's cheaper to buy Excel than to pay for the employee to train on the new tool.
j_s
First-class source control / versioning.