At least my spaghetti code goes into one direction only...
Excel has long had an option to display 'precedent' and 'dependent' cells.
You can actually see the spaghetti right there.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/display-the-relat...
Huh? At least in the versions I've used I've always needed to type the commands in German.
There's even an online German - English Excel dictionary...
It was an excel file created in pandas that threw an error on english commands but worked if the code included german ones.
I don't know how or why that happens, I just know I need to get away from it.
It's great for laying out things meant to print, and making invoices and stuff... But why didn't we have code files and proper fixed layout DB-style tables as "pages" that can go in a workbook?
Maybe keeping everything as 2D as possible is a necessary compromise for the spatial thinkers out there, and they just wouldn't want it if it was full of boring linear stuff.
I love the reactivity and the concept that anywhere you put a value, you can put an =expression. But the 2D stuff seems like it's for the people who always have a sense of where things are in space.
They've done a good job of convincing people that it's not programming and they can do it, I can't really complain, because if Excel didn't exist we might all still have to use paper on a regular basis, or completely unstructured text files.
You would think the ideal would be to allow everything Excel currently does, but also have some other model with more separation of code, data, and visuals, like node-based programming and separate cloud-synced pure tables.
Excel can almost cover a lot of "real programming" use cases, but not quite. The upgrade path seems to be Excel to Access to Custom app, rather than Excel to Excel but with more of the advanced features.
But I really like Excel for allowing me to just plop stuff down wherever when I'm brainstorming something, or just want to do a one-off calculation before I quit-without-saving.
Then it's pretty bad but still better than writing some custom software like people would probably do without it.
Because we have been doing it that way for almost 4,000 years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#History
Humans have organized data into tables, that is, grids of columns and rows, since ancient times. The Babylonians used clay tablets to store data as far back as 1800 BCE.[16] Other examples can be found in book-keeping ledgers and astronomical records.[17]
Since at least 1906 the term "spread sheet" has been used in accounting to mean a grid of columns and rows
What you want is the paradigm of Numbers from Apple. Their office suite is good, and it has the benefit of being opinionated. They're not trying to ape Microsoft, like all the open-source projects.
The main danger in Excel is that any area of a sheet can be treated as a pseudo table.... except it really isn't, and you can inadvertently sort some fields, while leaving the others alone, effectively scrambling your data.
A lot of people using Excel, even some of the more advanced stuff like if statements and logic, don't even realize that they're writing programs, and I think that's genuinely awesome: people are able to utilize the power of programming by accident.
I still use spreadsheets all the time for small number crunchy things, just due to how it's "reactive by default". I find it's actually really useful to immediately see everything update after changing a value. Admittedly, I mostly use Google Sheets nowadays simply because it's "good enough" and much easier to share with friends. Could I write a program to do all that number crunching that performs better? Obviously yes, I could start a new Julia project and mop the floor with Excel or Google Sheets in regards to saving cycles, but that would take me 20x longer and I'd lose all the nice features of a spreadsheet.
Granted, this is coming from a strictly Anglo-American perspective; I cannot speak to Excel's ability to use other languages.
Free, fast, accurate. Pick any three!
I find it's an overblown issue. Those of us that prefer functions in English can just set Excel to use it. When someone sends you a file it displays in your chosen language. And having the default being localized makes it usable for the majority of people who don't speak English.
On a serious note, I dread excel. If your PC is set to german, excel will translate the VBA keywords to german. But if you want to type them, you have to do that in english and then have excel translate them.
I don't want to accept that crap like this is the standard.