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Comment by taylorwc | Hacker News Reader

Oh, wow. I love where this is headed. Spreadsheets are one of the most abused products in a normal business--used for everything, and then some poor excel jockey ends up being forced to create a semblance of order from the chaos.

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That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype.

If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software.

But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet, just with robust engineering practices, typically involves several-months-long projects with many developers and managers, which is expensive.

I once reverse engineered a spreadsheet that had cost the best part of a million pounds to develop - I made the relevant manager very unhappy by pointing out that significant chunks of the beast did absolutely nothing.

I did come to really like the "Trace Dependents" and "Trace Precedents" features in Excel! :-)

Yeah... the worst part of spreadsheet is that it's hard to document their structure and purpose. You may try to explain it with cell comments and blocks of color, but there's no easy way to signal the entry point or see an overview of how the different parts work together.

At least they are functional reactive, so it's easy to trace the evaluation of expressions.

Quickbase is the usual suspect for workflow via a spreadsheet, with functionality that's broader than say Airtable.

Google's "app maker" looks like their attempt to do something similar. https://developers.google.com/appmaker/ Though they seem to have left out the 'start from a spreadsheet' part.

>But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet

can you explain this to me? i've never used spreadsheets extensively so i'm clearly ignorant but my impression was that the only thing you could really (i know you can bend the rules etc.) is data transformation. when you say application is what you mean? i.e an ETL app or do you mean more than that?

Excel can pretty much do anything you'd want in an application, though not in a particularly maintainable way. GUIs? Yes. Data updates triggered by GUI actions or cell entry changes? Yes. Interacting with external resources? Yes, that too. It can do a lot more than data transformation (except in the sense that all computation can be modelled as data transformation between inputs and outputs, in which case, yes, that's all Excel can do but all any other app does, too.)

The more that's been done in Excel, the more pain it will be to maintain it in Excel or port it to a non-Excel platform, because Excel is seductive for write-once, but horrible for maintenance, and the people in an org who have it as their main tool are unlikely to be either cognizant of the problem or devoted to spending effort mitigating it.

Excel in business / finance is a great mish-mash of ETL, modelling (from simple statistics to pretty advanced optimization), graphics and dashboarding. With too little structure and documentation to be good for you. A big plus is that every step is (at least without VBA) user transparent. From Excel to application would mean specs by non-sexually writers and continuous exceptions on specs when thereto unknown use cases of pretty much the same spreadsheet are found. (Since you don't exist unless you run your own spreadsheet, users often branche from the sheets of others.)

Someone needs to create Spreadsheets Anonymous and share the crazy stuff people do in Excel, the best one I've seen is a full GUI wizard (back, next etc.) in VBA.

I once worked at a large company (70K employees) in which the check request software (that is, if you needed to pay a vendor with a written check) was written in VBA embedded in Excel, using Outlook (the client, not Exchange) as Workflow.

You opened the "spreadsheet", which hid Excel itself and showed a form. You filled it out, clicked Send and it used your local Outlook client to email a copy of itself to your boss, who then opened it and was presented with another form for approval, etc, up through finance and finally to the person who wrote the check.

It was amazingly ugly and fragile, and of course, there was no way for anyone to see the state of the system (because the 'state' was distributed among the entire workforce's Exchange inboxes!).

Want to know the status of your check request? No problem, simply call everyone who might have been in the approval chain and ask them to search their inboxes. Hope you find the most current person!

(updated to correct the name of the software)

God, I work in an environment like that. We are a non-profit, and our primary CRM is The Raiser's Edge. However, data is never manipulated within The Raiser's Edge. Instead every process involves exporting data from The Raiser's Edge, manipulating it with an MS Office application, and then re-importing it.

When I started, almost every process was based around Access, using queries made using the query builder. With some basic scripting I managed to cut a couple of man-months of work down into about an hour or two of work a month. The entire thing is more fragile than a stack of cards though.

At this point I could literally write a 200 page dissertation on all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. But it works, and it is cheap. So there you go.

In the late 90s I worked for a company that ran their manufacturing logistics using Lotus Notes.

An excel form / outlook workflow would have been an improvement.

There are lots of great example replies here.

I miss using machinations in MS Access back in the day. Now with Google Sheets, I am left wonting for a tool that enforces primary keys and is /easy/ to set up a view or query.

I worked in a department at one of the largest tech companies that only developed custom, complex Excel plugins. It wasn't my cup of tea but there's definitely a lot of expertise out there.

I'm at a 250 EE company with very small ops budget and I built a stable and modular account planning and CRM system (when we had 150 EEs) that uses structured + validated + protected Google Sheets for user inputs and some viz, Alteryx as the ETL, and Tableau (Reader) as the visualization. Took half a junior person and half a senior person to maintain it for 100 clients and 200 users. It has served well as a prototype for our Salesforce installation this year, which has enabled us to decommission half of the modules in the Google Sheets system. If we had gone straight from nothing to Salesforce it would have induced shock in most of our employees, and our data and processes would not have been ready to just drop into Salesforce. In my mind, that is the best use case for a spreadsheet 'app' ... build it from the start with the goal of it being a transitional tool to a 3rd party app, nudging users along the way to professional processes.

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