Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Huh?

If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs.

I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease.

Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite.

I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)

I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way.

*I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier to use word for compatibility with someone else--but for the most part I much prefer using Google day-to-day.

I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers.

There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults.

There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that

  0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3

in floating point numbers (hint: none of those numbers actually exist in the floating point number system, when you ask for 0.1 you get a different number that happens to print out as '0.1')

There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it.

However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.

Former Excel developer here. In Excel 97, the difference between the values needed to be less than 1e-16 times the magnitudes of the operands to be considered equal. It makes sense since such a small proportion is unlikely to occur by chance through arithmetic without the values being "equal" in the original base.

In Inflex decimals are not floating point, they’re fixed precision. So 0.1+0.2=0.3 produces #true. You can try by hitting the Formula button here: https://inflex.io/try

And you can choose an arbitrary level of precision: https://discourse.inflex.io/t/how-to-increase-decimal-places...

RE the grid I agree completely, I have a blog post about it: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid

I’ve considered adding floating points as an optional advanced feature, but on the other hand, unums might also be a better approximate number type.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com