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Comment by middayc | Hacker News Reader

I personally am also not that huge fan of Excel, a small reason to name it like this was also to try to challenge that concept a little :) . With something more structured, declarative, immutable and exact:

* For example, what if Excel wasn't an endless canvas, it would seem conceptually clearer if one sheet was exactly one table with known shape (and you can of course create multiple tables in the same workbook).

* whole column should have the same "formula" and the row for sums / averages and other aggregate functions is not positionaly determined but is more declarative and always on the end.

* header columns are a specific row, not just the first of the rows, or missing

I'm not saying such limited "Excel" would be a better Excel, but maybe it would make more sense, be safer and more predictable, for a subset of users. Anyway ... it's just a sub-experiment.

What negative connotations of Excel do you see?

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Excel becomes a tool where people without a solid grasp of it use it for _everything_, at times mutating data without knowing it.

In the DE space, Excel is the bane of my existence. Some examples of messes we are asked to unravel:

* Cut and paste errors are too easy, once had an an executive boardroom meeting get derailed because one of the execs transposed a column header without realizing it.

* "Who has the most recent file?" becomes a cat and mouse game that sometimes does not have a single answer.

* Just yesterday I dealt with a "business critical" issue where a workbook with >300K VLOOKUPS caused the workbook to become unusable on common workstations - recalc times (with multithreading on) were excessive.

These are common stories, but my biggest issue is reproducibility. Understanding how data arrived at its current state can be impossible, and non/semi technical business users are often not held accountable for an audit trail. At times, Excel being an option is why we don't build more robust solutions, Excel is the gateway drug to failure.

"Spreadsheet" sometimes equates to "a mess", where "data frame" equates to sanity. Reforming the concept of a spreadsheet is a noble goal, but perhaps there is too much history to overcome.

Cool examples, thanks! I haven't used Excel extensively, but I sometimes help at some company where the non-IT founder made complex set of Excel spreadsheets for various things and I rather not touch them at all.

I see too much chance to overwrite something I didn't mean to, or without noticing even. Contrary to Scripts those things are not reversible or reproducible ... I'm not sure if there is some log of changes in Excel.

So at the end, maybe really another reason to change the naming ... :p

It sounds like all your problems are solved with the built in "insert table"

Interesting. I didn't know about this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-and-format...

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