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Spreadsheets might be the best possible tool and represents an inflection point where any improvements detract from other dimensions. So it’s like the Pareto frontier for software/data projects.

I’ve been waiting years for someone to solve this as there are serious flaws that I’d like fixed.

But all the “improvements” end up breaking other things. For example, airtable seems cool but its cost makes it non-comparable (eg, email a spreadsheet to a million people, a million can “fork” try pricing that with airtable; save a spreadsheet to disk, archive forever, etc).

I think that everyone can program, but few will be professional programmers. And many of the fixes for Excel are assuming that all people who program should act like professional programmers. And this isn’t possible or likely.

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What about strongly-typed spreadsheets? I’d kill for a strongly-typed spreadsheet. So many literal million-dollar mistakes are caused by typing (not “typing”) errors in spreadsheets, and Excel makes it easy to do the wrong thing.

Ad-hoc SQL workday be nice too. PowerQuery is nice (great, even) but it doesn’t feel like it’s a part of Excel - and while it’s language is better than SQL, I really don’t want to have to learn a whole new syntax to express the same simple ideas.

I try to make my analyses in something reproducible and then have it “still work” in Excel. So the strongly typed stuff is done elsewhere.

It’s funny though because so many people who crank on excel don’t know what types are. And don’t know what variables are. And don’t have the layers of mental abstraction that programmers who want types have and need.

So the expected protections don’t really happen. So while it’s nice to not convert “01” to “1” automatically, lots of errors will probably be caused by people trying to add “01” and “02” and getting “0102” and being super confused.

I didn't realize you can do string concatenation with + .

You can’t in excel, but I was referring to if strong types the language could understand what to do with “+” for strings so could concat instead of fail.

I'd prefer it to fail rather than overload the `+` operator for unrelated types. VB gets few things right, but of the things it does get right: using the `&` operator for string concatenation makes far more sense than overloading `+`.

See also: why JavaScript is the way it is.

During a massive migration to a different device management service I opened my CSV and saved it as xlsx as the site didn't support csv. Instantly 12% of the serial numbers had their leading zeroes removed and needed a corrective action. ~1800 devices.

Excel "helpfully" auto formatting zip codes, part numbers, etc with leading 0s into integer columns deserves to replace null references as the billion dollar mistake.

They remained a couple of genes because Excel routinely mangles the names into dates. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

Hexidecimal values will often get converted to scientific notation if there is an "e".

Isn't Airtable effectively a strongly-typed spreadsheet? It forces you to chose the 'field type' for everything.

Airtable is strongly typed in the fields of the tables, but the expression language is not. It is my conclusion based on researching Airtable, that the decision to have well typed tables is so that relational operations work nicely, and so that they can implement interfaces on top of these tables easily, such as calendars and work planning things etc. I don’t think that there is an underlying motivation to fix the ill-type code of the world, so to speak. Any non-trivial code work is done in JavaScript, anyway.

> Any non-trivial code work is done in JavaScript, anyway.

JavaScript is strongly-typed though, it just lacks a way to declare types. One can easily restrict types in script code (using `typeof` for primitives and `instanceof` for object prototypes).

People refer to it as "weakly-typed" because most (but not all) of the built-in types have implicit conversions to other types; and many of which are non-obvious: https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs

I commented elsewhere in this submission that I am working on a strongly typed spreadsheet. (Don’t want to spam my product link.)

I do think that bringing new syntax to the table is justifiable if it brings new concepts with it.

I agree, power query is essentially a separate product and doesn’t feel first class. I think that probably explains its relative obscurity, despite being highly powerful.

> So it’s like the Pareto frontier for software/data projects.

Yes, I like this point of view a lot. Like probably the majority of HN, I dread the very idea of a .xls file, but most problems are related to people not understanding the tradeoffs as opposed to shortcomings of Excel itself. "Usability by non-technical people" is a respectable if underappreciated dimension.

I have a friend who tells a story of how “Excel saved the world” because during the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak Excel was used so much.

So it’s not so much to exclude, but to figure out how to use it and include it.

I think Excel is like the saturated fat of the data world. Widely used, found bad in many situations, tried to be removed completely, replacements caused more harm (sugar), now figuring out the right kind and what combinations are good.

> And many of the fixes for Excel are assuming that all people who program should act like professional programmers.

This is the key insight and one that the other replies somewhat hilariously ignore.

An Excel replacement is going to be "ugly" to programmers' eyes. It has to be since this is what makes it useful to the wider population.

What it needs to be is a bit better.

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