Re:Excel is pretty dang cool
by scubakid on Friday August 12, 2022 @12:43PM
(#32441008)
Excel is great until suddenly it's not. When I started building ProjectionLab, it began as an excel spreadsheet that (at first) was easy to share and explain to friends and family who wanted a better retirement plan. But as they asked for more flexibility and new features, it spiraled out of control into a complex web of advanced Excel features that became opaque and unmaintainable. No doubt Excel is powerful and feature-rich, but sometimes layering on more and more of those advanced features isn't the answer.
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Would it be any different if you used a different tool and/or programmed everything manually?
In my experience, it would be 50x worse because Excel handles for you a lot of things that are extremely time consuming to code manually. (eg. error handling)
Maintainability » everything else.
Basically on the long term the possibility to use real code that is easy to change and understand will save you incredible amounts of time. If you reach a point where your code is too complicated that you are afraid to change anything, you're basically stuck.
I guess it depends on what you mean by worse. In my case, I abandoned excel and rebuilt the tool as a web app using Vue.js, Chart.js, Firebase, etc., which is what ProjectionLab is now. More overall development work, but the end result is way better than a spreadsheet.
Re:Excel is pretty dang cool
by proamdev123 on Friday August 12, 2022 @01:55PM
(#32441888)
But would you say using that web stack initially would have been overkill?