31 comments

[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] thread
This is very silly and nearly gave my manager an aneurysm
Hear me out. Now your time-series finances can include %-change metadata in between columns!
Exciting development. (A more accurate ratio would be 40:34, with the points oriented top and bottom instead of left and right.)
Interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has created a 3D type spreadsheet, where you make calculations across different x,y,z planes. I suppose you could do this now with a standard 2d speadsheet, but it would require a lot of finagling.
I swear I remember there being a 3D spreadsheet on the market back in the early '90s(?), but couldn't find it with a quick web search. So I might be confabulating.

That said, you're right that it can be done with modern spreadsheets. It doesn't even require that much finagling:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/439501/how-to-create-3d-work...

(comment deleted)
One of my favorite ideas in this space is Lotus Improv. It lets the user edit and view arbitrary "tensors" and not just 2d or 3d data. The UI/UX is fairly intuitive and I'm sad no one developed the idea further. It's formula system is also very interesting.

Here is a demonstration video I found about it

https://youtu.be/lTko_Pt2ZZg?si=9xtATPq7NU9oqooa

Wow, I've never seen Lotus Improv but so far there's a lot to love.

If you're not aware, excel has something similar to the formula system if you use tables, and in combination with LET and LAMBDA it's also pretty pleasant.

I've got the rest of the video to watch, but thanks for your comment!

Thank you! I am blown away!
An SQL database can be an n-dimensional spreadsheet.
It's especially apropos that the creator has "yonder.website"; just like a hexsheet has a third axis, certain speech groups in the US distinguish not merely the binary {"here", "there"}, but a trichotomy {"here", "there", "over yonder"}.

> "There was Mr. Man, yonder was the garden, and here was old Brother Rabbit" —almost JCH

Come for the hexagonal spreadsheet, stay for the Jankó keyboard!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4REjqGc9w

There's many to choose from[0]. I would imagine having a keyboard with fourths and fifths nearby would be better. So different straight lines would make the circles of fourths and fifths. The article also mentions a Hex[1] sequencer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_keyboard

[1] http://www.dynamictonality.com/hex.htm

what data would best be kept in a hexsheet rather than a table? I struggle to see the best use case - hexagons are cool - I would like it if this was useful.
How about the tile data of a strategy game?
I've got no idea what I could use it for, but I do like it. It looks like Pascal's triangle [1], so I'm sure some computations will roll out naturally, provided the formulas have relative addressing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_triangle, which even shows a hexagonal grid!

I can see it being useful for exactly that sort of thing. I've approximated hexagonal grids in spreadsheets by making each cell a square and then merging adjacent squares, alternating by row:

  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][
   ][  ][  ][  ][  ][  ]
  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][
   ][  ][  ][  ][  ][  ]
  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][
Useful for working on puzzles like https://puzzles.mit.edu/2021/puzzle/triangles/
This is crazy and amazing, thanks for sharing.

I now want Matt Parker to do a video about it.

He loves both spreadsheets and hexagons.

Magic hexagons exist. We want Parker hexagons now.
Sir, you are letting the intrusive thoughts win.

reading the comments from the 2009 inspiration source post (https://secretgeek.net/hexcel) made me a bit nostalgic for the era gone by.