Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

Re:Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet by pseut on Monday October 21, 2013 @12:29PM (#6586568)

From the video, this looks like a graphical spreadsheet debugger. That is a fucking fantastic idea. It's been a while sine I used a lot of excel, but this would have been great.

I think you'd want to target non-programmers who use a lot of excel (so people in "business") and just bring them more debugging features. An excel IDE would be an ambitious potential next step.

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Re:Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet by crrashby on Monday October 21, 2013 @12:52PM (#6586704)

I'm not sure I agree with the second point. Excel has tons of debugging features, too many. It means most people don't know about all the tools and they're all really badly designed. This is about getting rid of all that and creating one new feature, the tree view. Which offers way more functionality on it's own.

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Re:Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet by thegranderson on Thursday October 24, 2013 @05:49PM (#6608236)

While Excel has SOME debugging features, they really don't work well at ALL for large formulas. I don't need something to help me debug some multiplication.

But when I'm offsetting to an array upon which I'm selecting and summing a subset of these cells with an if-driven sumproduct, and maybe dynamically looking up all of the ranges with more index/matches.... its impossible to look at in the little formula tracing box.

I can't wait to try this out.

[ Parent | on HN ]