Hexsheets: Hexagonal Spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

Hexsheets: Hexagonal Spreadsheets

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81 pointspopcalc30 comments

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This is crazy and amazing, thanks for sharing.

I now want Matt Parker to do a video about it.

He loves both spreadsheets and hexagons.

Magic hexagons exist. We want Parker hexagons now.

https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths for those who don't know who Matt Parker is

Come for the hexagonal spreadsheet, stay for the Jankó keyboard!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4REjqGc9w

There's many to choose from[0]. I would imagine having a keyboard with fourths and fifths nearby would be better. So different straight lines would make the circles of fourths and fifths. The article also mentions a Hex[1] sequencer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_keyboard

[1] http://www.dynamictonality.com/hex.htm

This works nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout

Nice to play chords with a single (fat) finger, and you can go through the circle of fifths by moving vertically.

Even more hexagonal : Wilson MicroZone U-648 Array Keyboard from Starr Labs : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffa-XiMMeVo

Next do it with Penrose tiles!

Might be easier with Ammann Beenker tiles which are all 45 degree angles : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammann%E2%80%93Beenker_tiling

Penrose tiles are more fun to address, as all addresses need to be relative.

Sir, you are letting the intrusive thoughts win.

reading the comments from the 2009 inspiration source post (https://secretgeek.net/hexcel) made me a bit nostalgic for the era gone by.

Hear me out. Now your time-series finances can include %-change metadata in between columns!

Interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has created a 3D type spreadsheet, where you make calculations across different x,y,z planes. I suppose you could do this now with a standard 2d speadsheet, but it would require a lot of finagling.

One of my favorite ideas in this space is Lotus Improv. It lets the user edit and view arbitrary "tensors" and not just 2d or 3d data. The UI/UX is fairly intuitive and I'm sad no one developed the idea further. It's formula system is also very interesting.

Here is a demonstration video I found about it

https://youtu.be/lTko_Pt2ZZg?si=9xtATPq7NU9oqooa

Wow, I've never seen Lotus Improv but so far there's a lot to love.

If you're not aware, excel has something similar to the formula system if you use tables, and in combination with LET and LAMBDA it's also pretty pleasant.

I've got the rest of the video to watch, but thanks for your comment!

Aw, he demos the Windows version - the original NeXTstep version has timeless aesthetics.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

Another innovative but forgotten piece of “better than spreadsheet” software is Javelin PLUS.

https://archive.org/details/Javelin3_5

Thank you! I am blown away!

I swear I remember there being a 3D spreadsheet on the market back in the early '90s(?), but couldn't find it with a quick web search. So I might be confabulating.

That said, you're right that it can be done with modern spreadsheets. It doesn't even require that much finagling:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/439501/how-to-create-3d-work...

I think I first saw the concept of a 3D spreadsheet in Quattro Pro.

The following link seems to confirm this :

https://www.kstreetstudio.com/science/sams/qpro/concept.html

I have not seen that, but you'd probably like Microsoft's SandDance[0].

Try it in your browser: https://microsoft.github.io/SandDance/app/

[0] https://pldb.io/concepts/sanddance.html

An SQL database can be an n-dimensional spreadsheet.

I've got no idea what I could use it for, but I do like it. It looks like Pascal's triangle [1], so I'm sure some computations will roll out naturally, provided the formulas have relative addressing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_triangle, which even shows a hexagonal grid!

I can see it being useful for exactly that sort of thing. I've approximated hexagonal grids in spreadsheets by making each cell a square and then merging adjacent squares, alternating by row:

  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][
   ][  ][  ][  ][  ][  ]
  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][
   ][  ][  ][  ][  ][  ]
  [  ][  ][  ][  ][  ][

Useful for working on puzzles like https://puzzles.mit.edu/2021/puzzle/triangles/

This is very silly and nearly gave my manager an aneurysm

Exciting development. (A more accurate ratio would be 40:34, with the points oriented top and bottom instead of left and right.)

It's especially apropos that the creator has "yonder.website"; just like a hexsheet has a third axis, certain speech groups in the US distinguish not merely the binary {"here", "there"}, but a trichotomy {"here", "there", "over yonder"}.

> "There was Mr. Man, yonder was the garden, and here was old Brother Rabbit" —almost JCH

Japanese also has that distinction: kore, sore, are

https://wp.stolaf.edu/japanese/grammar-index/genki-i-ii-gram...

what data would best be kept in a hexsheet rather than a table? I struggle to see the best use case - hexagons are cool - I would like it if this was useful.

How about the tile data of a strategy game?

Information about your bee hives

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