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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

The ultimate no-code tool is Excel. It is the beach to code ocean. It’s about lowering the threshold of results possible to the widest possible group of people. You can have extra modules and plugins and you will always see people who have never dabbled with code before snorkel down to more and more complex functionality. No code done right is a gym - you get users willing to do something, and you enable them to do whatever they are willing to work for. I was one of those users - started with Flash, then trickled into action script, then trigonometry and animation, then JS, PHP. Stereotypes and preconceptions about code are the biggest hurdle for many. All you have to do is let them play and see whose brain naturally carries the load and asks for more. So Id say no code doesn’t replace engineers, but makes more of them.

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> No code done right is a gym - you get users willing to do something, and you enable them to do whatever they are willing to work for.

Exactly! Nearly every self-taught programmer started this way. They had something they wanted to achieve and learned enough to get that done. The real opportunities here are in creating tools that do have depth behind the scenes which users can learn gradually as they need to.

No-code is the on-ramp to the yellow brick road - people who have challenges that take them further than that should be able to grapple with the code abstractions behind the wizard's curtain.

Excel is one of the most powerful tools for business ever created and the vast majority of SaaS is providing some specialized behavior of it. That said, I’d hesitate call it the ultimate no-code tool mostly for mundane reasons: no version control, no comments, unconstrained with multiple ways to do something, limited scalability past a certain size or data, no user facing “front end” (e.g. an online form). I’m therefore very hesitant to say that excel is the best we can do. In fact I’m quite sure there’s a multi hundred billion dollar low code product waiting to be built and no shortage of people trying to figure out what it is.

> no version control, no comments, unconstrained with multiple ways to do something, limited scalability past a certain size or data, no user facing “front end”

I don’t think you and I are using the same Excel...

Which feature have I mischaracterized?

If there's a good way to version control Excel I'm intrigued.

With sharepoint you can check the file in/out and see version history, possibly with a comment on each versio. But it’s not very similar to version control system. Particularly since formulas and data live together. Better than nothing. (As soon as it gets harder to use, people revert to saving files locally and emailing them to each other... so it’s about as good as it can be really)

“Revision Tracking” is the built-in tool for this, which is about as good as most no-code solutions I’ve seen.

There’s a git extension, git-xltrail, if you want to use Excel with git.

I actually built an external version control system for Excel a few years ago. It is actually a hard problem to solve, as you have to figure out when a user cuts and pastes between worksheets to be useful.

I can’t speak for OP but doesn’t office365 have some sort of versioning mechanism for documents? Through share point or teams or something?

No where near as useful or powerful as Git

not having something as powerful as what is generally considered the best is not the same as not having something.

Most low code tools I've seen companies drop 6-7 figures on would be worlds better if they had Excel's level of version control.

I've seen low code vendors claim you can do reviews in git... but its an experience not unlike reviewing changes to a generated hibernate or entity framework xml. Its not really reviewable

There is a "user facing front-end" as well. UserForms give you customizable dialogs for displaying/prompting the user.

I frankly haven't used vba for a couple decades at this point, but if you dig deep enough its pretty much all there. Combined with sharepoint/etc you can probably get a lot of the UI to be web facing as well.

I've worked in a Forture 20 company. Literally no one has ever used version control for Excel.

  meaningless_roi_calculator.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v1.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_with_fabricated_hours_saved_v1.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.xls
  ~meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.temp.xls
  meaningless_roi_calculator_jerry_bullshit_numbers_v3.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_caluclator_v3.xlsx

> The ultimate no-code tool is Excel.

What? How can you sum the numbers in a row without writing a line of code? I've seen lots of people using Excel for simple and complex tasks, and every single one of them wrote code to accomplish their task.

> How can you sum the numbers in a row without writing a line of code?

Drag your mouse over the cells and press the sum button.

As a bonus, you'll see Excel filling the next cell with a formula for summing, which you can ignore if you don't care, but which provides a seamless opportunity for you to learn a bit of formula language. Step by step, these opportunities will let you become a more proficient Excel user.

Sounds cool. I never used the "buttons" on spreadsheets, but they are definitely a nice learning resource for some people. Still, it's easier to just look at a list of functions described in plain English, than try to interpret the hyeroglyphs that appear on the buttons.

Actually the functions are always shown in the user's language. The formulas are translated even for files created in other languages, which makes it a lot easier for beginners.

By selecting all the cells in the row and clicking the sum button?

I get your point though, many excel users are writing bits of code here and there, especially if you consider math to be code.

A client of mine does web page mockups in Excel.

I had a civil engineer once send me a dense, complicated flowchart as PDF that I thought they had done in Visio but when I asked for the source file it turns out it was "drawn" in Excel.

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