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Comment by s0rce | Hacker News Reader

I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.

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I wrote a VB macro that displays the formula for a cell, next to the cell. Granted you have to add a cell (typically a column) to make space for it. It returns either a formula, or "constant" if the cell doesn't contain a formula. I could make it more sophisticated, but just those two things are enough to make spreadsheets a lot easier for me to follow.

Following spreadsheets is like trying to find something in my garage if all of the boxes have lids. But if the boxes are all open, I can find stuff in a jiffy, even if the boxes are disorganized.

The closed toolbox is a nice analogy for opening a sheet full of numbers. A foreign Excel sheet can take a lot of clicking around to get an idea of how it works sometimes.

Control-backtick toggles formulas. No need for VB(A).

Ah, I didn't know that. So I tried it.

It does display formulas, but by hiding the values. What my macro does is allow the formula to be displayed permanently in its own column.

Granted I'm one user out of many, and have switched to programming for any kind of quantitative work. but I'm still quite supportive of Excel.

Do you realize it toggles data and formula display? That ought to be fine for anyone with more short term memory than a gnat.

Excel sheets are built visually so there is absolutely no sane way to parse them. Just the same thing as trying to restructure a pdf at the end of the day.

Yeah this is what Microsoft is trying to do with copilot.

But they couldn't figure it out either so it's limited to data formatted as table.

They’ve removed that limitation now, I think. That said, I still haven’t found any use-case for Copilot within an Excel workbook that works (probably because I’ve only ever asked it to do very difficult things since I don’t need it for easy stuff). So there’s that.

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