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Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

I'd have a couple of development proposals for excel:

1. Remove the ability to save workbooks. This would keep the excel in organisations where it excels (pun intended), namely quick & dirty sketches and visualizations. If you need something twice, it is likely you need that more than twice and you should be using something else.

2. If not that, give me a worksheet type that forces each cell in a column to have same formula or data type. and just a sheet that you can refer to as any other sheet, not a powerwhantnotthingy.

3. Version control. Seriously, Microsoft, what on earth are you paying your excel developers for if not this?

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I totally agree that this makes sense for certain types of Excel work -- the data analysis, report generating workflows. You can see my comment above about how we're addressing some of these issues with Mito.

However, not sure that these three points hold for the type of financial modelling work that is done in Excel today. There isn't a great unbundling of Excel for the LBO, etc world (yet), so the inability to save or have columns with multiple data types/formulas seems quite limiting for that world.

I was thinking that there were two types of worksheets. the current, freeform sheets, and in addition to that a new type that would enforce data integrity over columns. That would make it much safer to have worksheets for structured data and freeform sheets for visualizing etc separate.

(the first one was admittedly a bit tongue in cheek.)

> 3. version control

I think this is provided through either OneDrive/SharePoint or some other offboard solution. Do you really want Excel to have a native version control system? Seems like other solutions would always do this better.

Does onedrive/sharepoint or some other offboard solution show diffs between versions and have merge capabilities?

(I have not been using excel as anything but a scratchpad in years, so I may have missed some cool new features)

You get close to #2 using Excel’s table feature.

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