Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegitGandalf | Hacker News Reader

Tables are probably the most overlooked feature of Excel.

Why use tables?

* Each column is uniquely named - no more wondering if you are referencing the right cell, no more thinking about "to $ or not to $"

* The table's rows and columns are reliably discovered by pivot tables - no more wondering if the entire dataset is referenced by the pivot

* New columns that are formulas are automatically applied to every row

* Tables have names, so it is easy to understand which table a pivot is referencing

The true, reliable and sane power of excel lies in Tables + Pivots + Charts. If you drive most of the problem solving into those paradigms you will keep hair!

View on HN

Most people have no clue these features exist, or that Excel even has advanced data modeling that supports all sorts of goodies including strict types and joins/merges/appends. It's not as accessible as just basic sheets, but I've had no problem crunching millions of rows of data in Excel with sub-second response times.

Powerquery is great, but too bad it breaks with version upgrades.

isn't excel limited to just over a million rows?

Excel 2013 and later has a columnar database capable of handling millions of rows, but not through the standard sheets interface so it loses a lot of the utility people are used to.

How? Through what interface, or by what feature name to Google?

Excel refers to it as the “Data Model”. It allows joining tables/sheets and referencing them from other tables.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/08/2...

Thanks :)

Yes, although you can have multiple sheets each with a million rows. Kind of like sharding.

But I’d be fascinated what kind of system spec is required to get good performance on those kind of numbers. I’ve been on a Mac for years, where Excel is crippled by limitations.

Working with a Mac for the first time this year, excel on Mac is actually worse than excel 2010 :(

Tables have that all-too-common symptom of something that makes easy things even easier, but hard things way harder. Try making a table with a formula that involves more than the single row in which it's placed. What about tables with multi-row headers (e.g. title and units)? Section breaks in them? Merged parent data? I find I either want standard Excel layout, or a database. Tables don't really sit "between" those two; they're just their own extremely over-simplified universe that doesn't play nicely with anything else.

But hey, to each their own. Good on ya if Excel tables are what you need.

This, combined with judicious use of named ranges makes for much more pleasant formulas. Seeing `tax_rate` in the formula instead of `A$7$` is well worth the extra clicks.

I usually end up assigning names to nearly everything, single-cell constants, user input fields, computed lists, etc, etc

Apple's Numbers is table-oriented by design and I love it for that reason.

About tables, do they work when you automate the data entry part? For example, copy from a speadsheet into your spreadsheet with the first macro, and then transform the data with a second? That's 90% of my use case for Excel. (I know that doing this in Python/whatever would be "better" but I have to distribute this to users, and the only thing they have on their computer is Excel, and they're gonna manipulate the data after in Excel anyways).

They should...I think.

If anything add a 'ActiveSheet.Calculate' call to the end of your second macro and give it a test run?

I think Libreoffice Calc supports python integration. Maybe that way one could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately I suppose most users are stuck in the MS garden.

I've been using Excel on and off for years and had no idea that tables were a thing. I just assumed the entire sheet was a "table".

Oh excel...

What a love hate relationship I have with it.

On the one hand, it is great for doing a quick and dirty analysis with data not in a DB, on the other, it mangles data and translates the keywords/function names.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com