News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? by Timothee on Sunday January 11, 2009 @04:52PM (#429666)
Numbers, from the iWork suite, does this. You can name your rows and columns and just them in your formulas: http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/

Of course, it's not perfect if you look at the proprietary format, at the smaller number of formulas than Excel, and so on. But it's a nice piece of software as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? by CatDancer on Sunday January 11, 2009 @05:22PM (#429724)
I don't have a Mac so I don't have a way to tell if iWork does what I want or not, but note that simply being able to name a range doesn't do it.
Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? by Timothee on Sunday January 11, 2009 @09:08PM (#429977)
It's actually simpler than naming a range because you can use the names of the rows and columns that you have in the header of the table.

It's a moot point since you don't have a Mac but from what you describe, Numbers does what you're missing.

I saw in one of your later comments that you were also talking about multiple tables on the same page. Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page. So, in a table you can ask for the sum of a whole column without getting the numbers from another unrelated table on the same page. That's something that always bothered me in Excel.

Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? by CatDancer on Monday January 12, 2009 @10:21AM (#430527)
Tables as independent objects on the page does sound like what I'm getting at. Of course I'd need to see it to see if they're doing it the way I want ^__^