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Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by giaour on Monday October 24, 2022 @11:16AM (#33317818)
The way Excel lays out data and intermediate states visually is pretty intuitive (compared to, say, using a step-through debugger), but the formula editing pane has an atrocious UX. I would love to see Excel but with a scratch/snap-like interface for authoring formulas.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by nerdponx on Monday October 24, 2022 @11:28AM (#33317980)
The more I use Excel, the more I feel that its primary limitation is its UX for working with formulas.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by willhslade on Monday October 24, 2022 @12:21PM (#33318709)
Check out the new LET function.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by rbonvall on Monday October 24, 2022 @01:07PM (#33319344)
LET is a great syntactic improvement, but the UI is still the same. I'd love if the formula box supported the basic things one expects from a code editor, like syntax highlighting, formatting, indentation, comments, etc.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by criddell on Monday October 24, 2022 @11:44AM (#33318202)
The formula editor is pretty bad. If Microsoft fixed it and added GitHub integration easy enough for non-programmers, I think a lot of concerns about usage of Excel could be dealt with.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by Xeamek on Monday October 24, 2022 @11:58AM (#33318406)
This is actually great idea. If microsoft can add block-building programming for minecraft edu edition, why wont they do that to their flagship tool that would also help them in their competition against Google sheets.

Especially since pretty much every year we hear another story where some small Excell formula bug cost company millions of dollars. Redesining Excel formula pane should be their number 1 feature in 'todo'.

...unless they still care to add big features at all, and they aren't just in maintenance mode like most of their stuff

Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by rahimnathwani on Monday October 24, 2022 @12:12PM (#33318595)
> I would love to see Excel but with a scratch/snap-like interface for authoring formulas.

Long/complex Excel formulae should usually be broken into smaller chunks, with intermediate results stored in separate cells. For example, if you're calculating two numbers, and then calculating their ratio, it would be better to use three formulae instead of one. That way:

1. Each formula is shorter.

2. Each formula has a single purpose which can be understood.

3. The outputs of the intermediate steps in the calculation are obvious.

This applies also to complex nested IF() statements. Instead of calculating all the conditions inside the IF(), calculate them outside, and then reference the TRUE/FALSE cell values in your IF statement. When you need to debug why you're not getting the result you want, you can easily look at the intermediate calculations all at once, without needing to step through the calculation and check it in the order of calculation.

Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by giaour on Monday October 24, 2022 @12:46PM (#33319072)
Totally agree. This is exactly what I would do to debug a complex expression in a program: break out chunks into smaller expressions, assign their results to intermediate variables, then echo out or inspect those variables in a debugger. Once it clicks with users that an Excel cell is a variable, they tend to write more state out to the sheet so they can inspect it.
Re:The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’... by simulo on Monday October 24, 2022 @12:16PM (#33318640)
Bas Jansen and Felienne Hermans created a block based language, XLBlocks. Read their paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336187404_XLBlocks_...