Goodbye to an old spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye to an old spreadsheet

rubenerd.com

15 pointsTomte10 comments

> My M1 MacBook Air took about 11 seconds to load and save it each week! Though curiously if I save it as a classic Excel file, it loads on my Dell Pentium III in… wait, only 14 seconds? That’s probably worth its own post.

I guess the old format (xls) is quicker as it is not XML-like structure, rather than memory-dump of running excel process? I might be wrong here.

anything involving complicated formulas and macros can run a lot slower on the macOS versions of excel compared to the windows versions even using comparable hardware.

I had to run a bunch of VBA code for an economic model for my thesis and, while it was possible to run on my MacBook, for whatever reason it was an order of magnitude slower compared to computer lab windows machines (which technically had worse hardware).

20 year old Excel spreadsheets, often written by long forgotten summer interns, basically run the entire financial sector.

Always neat to see what others use to manager their personal finances. I've been a fan of Ledger for a long time: https://ledger-cli.org/

I've started using a Python script as my "Ledger" just for personal finances. Values in it look like this:

ledger = [

V(-204, "Payment to ABC", "10/12/24"),

V(3_530, "Deposit for Yadda", "10/12/24"),

]

I definitely want to have arrays of objects for my scripts to work on (rather than screwing around with spreadsheet math syntax), but I've been wondering if there's any IDE plugins that allow a better UX (GUI) experience for entering what I'd call "Tabular Computer Code". I know I could put this in a CSV file and import into objects from that, but frankly I'd rather type in the code than monkey around with another external file.

Maybe Spyder IDE? It supports tabular editing of arrays.

Good to know. I'm pretty locked into VSCode, but appreciate the info.

Maybe it's just me, but it was a bit of a disappointing read when the author decided not to provide any details about what's replacing it. Would have loved to hear a bit more about the decision to move.

Although, considering the author mentioned a loan with a partner maybe they were trying to rebuild it in Google Docs or something so they could more-easily see it together.

Agree - create a sign up link if it's going to become a product Ruben!

> I decided to rebuild it from scratch in another tool

That rarely ends well, at least for me.

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