Seeing like a spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

Seeing like a spreadsheet

davidoks.blog

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> But you will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel.

It’s a keyword search away. There are many, and they love Excel. How did you not find them?

https://excel-esports.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modeling_World_Cup

https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/15r53rc/why_i_unapol...

Excel is the pinnacle of user space applications. I wonder if there will ever be a tool—physical or otherwise—that has a higher combination of (utility * approachability).

Excel is used by middle-schoolers and post-doc graduates. You can run any kind of businesses in excel. You could go to space using excel. You can make art in excel. You can make a CPU in excel. You could write a book in excel (maybe that’s a stretch, but I guarantee it’s been done)

You can design a bitmap font in Excel, and use formulas to output the C array that you then paste into your Arduino IDE!

I know, because that's what I did!

The author must have never spent much time with an accountant.

You just have to go to Ballmercon.

Or are maybe they mean everyone is abandoning excel after they failed to patch out the cheeses and tried to attract the party gamers by breaking the meta with xlookup?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI

This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.

Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.

What makes companies special? They're state machines. Reality is a collection of systems of records, events and processes. Companies are special due to their people and their judgement and timing, and the data they have access to and what permissions they have to do things. And marketing? What else?

Excel (e spreadsheets) is the best quantitative planning piece of software.

There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can answer “what if I changed that” as seamlessly as excel.

Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.

Absolutely. And the data and code being stored all in one file makes it exceptionally nimble for the planning phase. You can generally count on any stakeholder in your org being able to handle it.

Can you give an example of what you mean by "planning?"

Budget planning, presumably. How much you are going to spend and on what, and what you need to charge for your products to break even or meet a profit goal.

I don't know how true it is today, but many a rollercoaster has been designed/planned in a spreadsheet. g-force and speed analysis, making sure there aren't any "blackout" points, etc. It allows you to iterate quickly and automatically appreciate the ramification of design decisions.

It doesn't have to be financial. It's anything that can be quantified.

Some random sheets I've used, neither made by me nor about business:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m08haqvTiXKIh4c7y4uM...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo_-HebVr_9PruE94LgT...

For better or worse...

A single spreadsheet used locally is probably the best imaginable tool for answering "what if I changed that."

That same sheet shared across an organization suddenly becomes a game of "what caused that change."

can Numbers by Apple ever catch up ??

Pivot Tables was the last big feature completely missing, which is now available. Numbers might meet most of the spreadsheet requirements, except some scripting requirements. There is Applescript for those who are inclined that way. For my own use cases, I use LibreOffice Calc, even on macos. I started using it an year ago, just to see if it can work at all. So far, I haven't had any blockers, but my usage is probably not so complex.

Biggest blocker: I can’t create reliable excel sheets that potential investors can look at in MS Excel, formulas tend to break.

If I can’t share the spreadsheet, it’s not very useful.

This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...

"Office, messaging and verbs" was excellent, thanks for the recommendation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407

Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people? Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.

They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.

We suck at excel because we recognize that it has a bad data model and avoid it. So when we want to calculate something we pick something with better structure. something more pleasant to use than the spreadsheets "it's a big bag of cells" approach.

Really, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now that I have better tools I don't enjoy doing work in them anymore.

I feel it's the extreme of "static vs dynamic languages". In Excel, even variables (cells) are dynamic, not fixed names in a lexical scope.

The reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically.

I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).

There is even a successful competitive scene: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/06/experie... https://excel-esports.com/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xw9w976jo

I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/

You can do this in Excel but it's not all in one cell [0].

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/spilled-range-ope...

I wrote this, hope people enjoy it!

Thanks I enjoyed it a lot.

I’ve been thinking about how AI will change the way companies are organized. It’s hard to believe that today’s corporation is the ultimate organizational form, there’s just too much stupidity on display.

How will companies compete in the future when they’re all just an AI wrapper?

I took the time to read this article last night, just wanted to let you know it was a great read. I liked the topic, the research you did and the writing style as well.

This has interesting speculation on the future business impact of AI, extrapolated from Excel:

"This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations, particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."

Hence the title and its hearkening back to seeing like a state - I would guess one of the author's related views is that a rigid, high-modern codification scheme will always miss the magic stuff that fills in the cracks. And you can't go without that without eventual unforeseeable consequences. It's a techne versus metis distinction I think

The rich and complex history of spreadsheets inspired me to build React Spreadsheet. Along the way I deepened (and others) understanding of the complexities and intricacies of spreadsheets https://iddan.github.io/react-spreadsheet

Thanks for that ad-read and self-promotion! Maybe next time you can contribute some insight that doesn't feed your balance (spread)sheet.

A recent blog post from Christoper Drum on running Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS in a 286 emulator https://stonetools.ghost.io/lotus123-dos/ .

I really feel for Dan Bricklin. He should have been richly rewarded for his innovation.

He was, for a time, until others made even better products. It would've been terrible if he had exclusive IP over the idea of "digital spreadsheet".

> And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet.

who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.

i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.

Really do think that spreadsheets are the most optimal way to coordinate agents.

Each row spins up a parallel agent, columns mapped as input, agent executes and writes new columns as output.

We tried initial implementation of this with rtrvr.ai building out Sheets Workflows, but I can't help but feel that there is a thread we're pulling towards a deeper insight on this

Was anyone using a spreadsheet to drive automation for testing earlier than 1988?

I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple SQA to lean heavily into that, but I’d love to hear of earlier examples.

I know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2_Spreadsheet?wprov=sfla1 existed since '84 and was in use in disparate parts of the company (I hit the printer division in the summer of '88). IBM was still using mainframe tools, including FORTRAN and APL for engineering work, and we were using BASIC for some testing automation as well as stuff written in assembly (bit banging of parallel ports as GPIO).

Automation was used in testing since the beginning, of course. (Earliest vivid example I have is from a 1956 television commercial.)

Spreadsheets certainly existed. We know that.

What I don't have is any example or testimonial from anyone, earlier than 1988, of using a spreadsheet to DRIVE automation used in testing. I would be surprised if I was the first to have thought of it. I can only say that my team asked around Apple and found no one doing this but our team, at that time.

I wrote my first AI agent (well a backpropagation model, LOL) in Excel on Mac in 1988. It could only handle several thousand parameters. But it was very cool to see the model in operation.

the "financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified" line is the whole essay in one sentence. worked at a startup that got acquired by PE and watched them reduce every relationship and piece of institutional knowledge into a cell in a model. six months later the people who actually knew why things were done a certain way had all left.

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