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Comment by Aardappel | Hacker News Reader

Author of TreeSheets here, AMA.

I see an interesting spreadsheet that is actually a directed graph of some kind. Are there cell addresses hidden somewhere? Can this be used as a spreadsheet?

It's not a DAG though, it is purely a tree (no shared children). There are no cell addresses.

You can kinda sorta use it as a spreadsheet, but it is pretty limited currently, see example here http://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/images/screenshots/screens... or also in the tutorial.

Looking through the source I see that a cell can contain a grid, which is a collection of cells, and those can nest.

I see why you don't want to worry about addressing cells, it would kill a lot of the utility of the program.

What are the tradeoffs in your mind?

I guess I always found the way traditional spreadsheets address cells very clumsy, especially with hidden formulas, and I enjoy inventing new ways of programming :) I can't claim this is better yet, since I haven't used it that much. I like the visible formulas as a programmer, but I could imagine others don't.

Wondering if there's a chance that you might have a Windows 32-bit version available somewhere for my ancient Vista machine. Or can the CI create one somehow? Beautiful program, thank you for creating this, and thank you for Sauerbraten!

I'm sorry, I removed support for 32-bit a while ago. While the code could probably be made to run on 32-bit still without too much trouble, it be quite a bit of work to reintroduce it.

I understand, it's the way of things. Do you perhaps have an archive of older releases?

I haven't.. though if you have visual studio installed, you should be able to check out commit 7b30199cbef49dbdb6f7b10f0fecea3c008e76ec from 2019 which is the last commit before I changed things over to 64-bit.

Note that also requires compiling wxWidgets according to the README.md in that commit, which is incompatible with my current install, otherwise I would have done it for you.

Actually I was able to find an old version via the Internet archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210624160236/http://strlen.com...

I took a stab and got a version from July 2011 going, then worked forward and ended up with a version from August 2 2019, which may be the version you're mentioning.

I appreciate that you would have compiled it for me! I would like to give it a shot myself some day.

Does the CI build Windows binaries? I could not find them at https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/actions

Yup, even with or without installer, see last run here: https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/actions/runs/9514897...

This is probably a stupid question, but how do you create the "trees" like you see in the screenshots? I can easily create hierarchical grids, which is great, but I can't figure out how to make a mind-map type graph.

Nevermind, I get it, you just change the rendering method. Very cool, I love that you can change the visualization method without changing the data structure!

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