Make up your own rules of probability

Re:Make up your own rules of probability by MichaelSalib on Monday January 31, 2011 @03:36PM (#2163055)

That barely begins to address the problems though. When you're writing formulas, you're writing in a small box with no syntax highlighting, no serious whitespace, and no comments. It almost seems like Excel's designers worked really hard to come up with a user interface that would make introducing errors trivial and noticing errors very hard.

And yeah, I understand that spreadsheets were never designed with the idea that people who would use them to enter long complex formulas or for purposes where defect detection would be really important, but that's how they're used in the real world.

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Re:Make up your own rules of probability by roc on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:41PM (#2163498)

> "It almost seems like Excel's designers worked really hard to come up with a user interface that would make introducing errors trivial and noticing errors very hard."

Or, rather, Excel's designers spent very little time and effort into support for non-trivial formula creation and use.

But, if we all seem to agree that Excel is not the place for serious calculations, can we fairly continue to take shots at Excel for being bad at supporting them?

i.e. When I see people maintain non-trivial web apps by opening notepad against production code, it never occurs to me to complain that notepad should have syntax highlighting, collaboration and version management, etc.

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Re:Make up your own rules of probability by MichaelSalib on Monday January 31, 2011 @07:54PM (#2163903)

I actually feel bad for the Excel devs. In my friend's experience, the relatively modern features that MS introduced into Excel like named cell references were deliberately avoided because they smacked of "programming" and "made things too complicated"...so it seems like the Excel guys lose no matter what.

But with something like making the formula editor reasonable, I think they do have some blame. Excel costs a heck of a lot more than notepad and it is billed as being a serious tool for professionals to use.

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Re:Make up your own rules of probability by joelhaus on Monday January 31, 2011 @03:55PM (#2163131)

Totally agree, hopefully MS will get on the ball one day and improve the editing features. Limited syntax highlighting and an awkward commenting tool are available, but mostly unusable.

Google Spreadsheets is catching up fast (and has even surpassed Excel in quite a few areas), I'm hoping that this motivates MS to make more improvements.

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Re:Make up your own rules of probability by shadowfox on Monday January 31, 2011 @04:57PM (#2163370)

I am not a serious spreadsheet user. But I am curious. In what areas have Google Spreadsheets surpassed Excel? (Collaboration tools is probably one)

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Re:Make up your own rules of probability by joelhaus on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:33PM (#2163473)

Correct, collaboration is much better (realtime editing/chat/cloud storage and sharing).

Admittedly, Excel has a smoother editing experience (which is the real issue here) and is probably better suited for more resource heavy tasks, but Google Spreadsheets excels [intentional] in the following areas:

API -- http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/

Scripts/Templates -- http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/

Forms -- http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

External data functions -- http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Revision History --

Some of this might be achievable in Excel, but it's not integrated as well and requires much more wrangling (e.g. VB scripts).

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