Excel Unusual – home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

Excel Unusual – home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets

excelunusual.com

149 pointshardmaru27 comments

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The demoscene has had a bit of fun with Excel too:

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=11368

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021

Cool stuff.

Under "Why bother with this blog?" are some off-topic ideas - this one for example:

The most important aspect: no matter what you want to do, start by thinking before reading from someone else or asking someone else (no matter who). ...

I suppose the value of this nugget depends on your goal. If your goal is to invent something devoid of any previous human experience, I suppose it could apply. Think outside the box. Reaallly outside the box. In fact, there is no box.

But if your goal is to invent something or solve any problem whatsoever that involves previous human experience (99.99% of situations), this seems more like an antipattern. Right up there with "never show anyone what you've done - they might steal it."

Still, this comment makes me think back to my days of programming on an old 6502 Atari computer. It was so hard to get documentation that it seemed like everything I did was my own invention - no matter how trivial. It's not hard to feel creative in that kind of environment.

I wonder if that's one of the things we actually miss when we think back to that simpler time. The unlikelihood of discovering that our inventions had already been done to death.

How old is this blog? There's a mysterious absence of any dates on any single page and even the comments don't have dates/times.

Merely supposition, but the way he talks mainly about 2003/2007 and only briefly mentions 2010 suggests it was written quite some time ago (I'd hazard a guess at say 2011). It's on shakier ground to guess based on the Excel styling but they look distinctly 2005!

Dates from the comments on the home page:

    ; cat excel_source.html | grep datetime | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/datetime="//' | sed -r 's/-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}T.*//' | sort -n | uniq -c
          2 2010
         39 2011
         39 2012
          7 2013
          2 2014
          2 2015
          1 2016
         13 2017
          1 2018

I'm gonna bet it's late 2010

You can find the date each article was published from the metadata Wordpress puts into the HTML header. The very latest article is from Jan 2017. The ones prior immediately prior to that are from 2012.

reminded me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeOEQVUWZ0&vl=en

Spreadsheets can quickly become horrendously complicated, to the point where writing a computer program with the same functionality, in a conventional language, is a whole lot simpler.

Corporations are filled with accountant wannabe programmers who got seduced by this ersatz programming.

Which is of course true. But in my experience people use excel because it is flexible and accessible. It helps you to store the relevant data and add additional information if necessary. This helps to produce answers to questions that come up e.g. by management, quickly. Of course IT and other dream of SAP monoliths that have all the information. But of course reality is much more messy than these systems and their UI is usually pretty shitty and laggy

And corporates also regularly have to buy SaaS moonshine in order to get work done, and then hire consultants to implement it, and deal with other consultants when something goes off.

So, Excel is the scratch pad of that world. And it’s good enough for a lot of the initial scratch work, and at even more complex levels it has the ability to provide results.

It’s tremendously good for most people, since most people will never be coders.

I suspect any intelligent civilization will end up with an excel like program eventually. There’s too much random crap that excel ends up helping many different kinds of people with.

a friend of mine manages his "food box" businesses logistics with a spreadsheet (google). The thing that it does well is he can adapt it as he changes how he runs his business. It's not super pretty, but I think it works better than coding an alternative that he can't really adapt as easily. With a few manual steps he has it working with shopify, label printers and bar code scanning. He keeps tweaking it as he works out better ways to do things and integrates it with other analytic tools.

The only major problem at the moment I can see with it, is it's not easy for anyone else to know how to use it.

One of my colleagues is currently developing a gallop simulator in Excel: https://galoppsim.racing/gb/

Can products such as SmartSheets, Airtable be applications built on spreadsheets? If yes, after going through some of the comments here, cant help but think, aren't they regression?

ps:- never used them.

Lame. Requires liking their Facebook account or tweeting to download. Was curious if anything would work with LibreOffice.

It seems to have an old comment about speed of OprnOffice. I think this has changed now, interested to see if this is still the case!

I don't generally encourage the practice of bypassing social gates -- if they want you to tweet or like to view their content, then just move on if you object -- but they don't actually check if you performed the social action. So you can just disable blocking the twitter button, click the tweet button, dismiss the popup and download

You can use this Javascript to bypass the block in the F12 console or a bookmarklet:

    document.getElementsByClassName("onp-sl-content")[0].style.display = "block"

> Excel is cheap and ubiquitous, everyone has it.

Compared to other programming languages, it’s certainly not cheap! In comparison to numerical analysis tools, maybe…

Indeed. It’s also only cheap until you find a company that was entirely powered by sticky tape and string in excel and the resident excel expert rides his motorbike into the back of a truck.

I have been the clean up guy there. Reverse engineering it is worse than reverse engineering Perl. Been that guy too.

I'd still prefer that to reverse engineering an APL program. Been there, done that. In the end, I did a clean room reverse engineering, which was way simpler.

How much APL code? And how much APL experience did you have prior?

Also...just out of curiosity, are you the Perl6 Liz?

This was way back in the late 70s porting an APL program of the University of Leiden to [TUTOR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_(programming_language)).

Whether I'm "the" Perl 6 Liz, I don't know. I know I am "a" Liz, and I do a lot for Perl 6, yes :-)

I'd never heard of TUTOR before and I'm sure old school APL was a pain.

Thanks for your work on P6 by the way. I'm not a regular user, but have dabbled and keep up with the on-going work.

Can spreadsheets not be documented in the same way that code can?

I imagine "documented" is typically not part of the vocabulary of a person who chooses Excel as their coding platform.

They can be, but often aren't. I basically make spreadsheets for a living, and actively try to do a good job of documenting how it works. Among other things that can help:

Adding comments in VBA. Why nobody does this is beyond me, but I've fixed dozens of spreadsheets with no comments.

Using named ranged and tables (not just plopping data in). Named ranges make formulas beautiful (=balance * interest rather than =B17 * F14). Tables help with formulas and make VBA accessing data much nicer.

Using cell styles to clue people in about functionality. The orange "input" style is an instant clue-in for people who know my spreadsheets. If they are scared of breaking things, those are the safe cells.

Using the "explanatory text" style next to inputs or to add notes throughout.

Organizing things in a cohesive manner. Often developers define their variables at the top of a function or sub rather than mixing them in throughout. That same amount of forethought can make spreadsheets much easier to follow.

Coding in Excel is probably highly correlated with not having documentation. It's not like normal software development is very good at it either.

I do not own Excel, hence it is not ubiquitous (ubique - Latin: "everywhere".) I do have LO Calc - that is cheap (price) and yet priceless (value).

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