Re:You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]
by astrobe_ on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:22AM
(#12451712)
Spreadsheets put together two aspects:
- data (raw and calculated)
- presentation
The original mistake is that both were made interdependent. Excel tries to fix that the hard way by introducing various reference modes, a lot of "do what I mean" magic and even nested spreadsheets/databases (aka "tables").
But it still leads to scary bugs, as the video shows: if you do things the wrong way the numbers you derive from your data are wrong and you don't even see it if you don't pay attention.
While watching the video I was wondering if all those features were brilliant or insane. The answer to me is that it's insanity.
If nothing else, HTML has shown for a long time already how one can - one should - make the content (data, programming) separate from the presentation. This idea has to be back-ported to spreadsheets now.
The first half of the video is really just keyboard and drag'n'drop tips, while the second half is really just brutal hardcore programming: "match", "if", "lookup", references, indirections, "debug mode", ...
Acknowledge that spreadsheet documents really are programs. Make a spreadsheet DSL then apply ideas from Lighttable to make it as "visual" and "easy" as possible.
The original mistake is that both were made interdependent. Excel tries to fix that the hard way by introducing various reference modes, a lot of "do what I mean" magic and even nested spreadsheets/databases (aka "tables").
But it still leads to scary bugs, as the video shows: if you do things the wrong way the numbers you derive from your data are wrong and you don't even see it if you don't pay attention.
While watching the video I was wondering if all those features were brilliant or insane. The answer to me is that it's insanity.
If nothing else, HTML has shown for a long time already how one can - one should - make the content (data, programming) separate from the presentation. This idea has to be back-ported to spreadsheets now.
The first half of the video is really just keyboard and drag'n'drop tips, while the second half is really just brutal hardcore programming: "match", "if", "lookup", references, indirections, "debug mode", ...
Acknowledge that spreadsheet documents really are programs. Make a spreadsheet DSL then apply ideas from Lighttable to make it as "visual" and "easy" as possible.