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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Excel is very often abused and made to do things it should definitely not be doing (massive files, enormously complex formulas). In many business situations, this may only lead to frustration and lost productivity, but in finance in particular the implications can be huge(1), and a faster, more stable, testable and transparent/auditable solution should definitely be found for critical applications.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsoft...

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Exactly, I'd be curious to see something that gives business analysts the interactivity of something like Excel but has ways to avoid the rigid, interlinked-sheets with ridiculous formulas that seem to be inevitable in a large model.

Functional Reactive Programming has some interesting parallels, though pointing to an FRP package is clearly not a complete solution.

I have dreamed of a similar thing for a long time...

When I worked in a (science research) lab, we had a few Excel files we passed around for performing various calculations. These were great in that my non-computer-fluent boss could use them (and even contribute). There were a few input boxes to fill out which were run through some calculations, and the answer spit out.

Pros:

* Single file

* Everyone has Excel installed on desktop

* Accessible. Even if you're not an Excel wizard, you can see and edit the basic formulas.

Cons:

* Rigid grid (Any documentation, notes, etc. must fit into the grid)

* Formulas are hidden, when you might want to highlight the most critical ones

* If you want to calculate intermediate results (which you do, to prevent very long formulas that are hard to read), you've got to plop them in some cells

* No meaningful variable names, A10:A55 what?

Excel is so entrenched, it'd probably be difficult for a slight improvement to gain any traction, but it would have made my life a heck of a lot easier.

And I'm by no means an Excel wizard, so there's a good chance that some of the Cons above can already be avoided... But I still want some kind of hybrid of LabVIEW and Excel.

Have you seen or tried slate[1] btw, and does it mitigate any of the cons you mention? I've only seen the demos for it and not tried it, so I don't know if it would be useful in practice.

[1]:https://www.useslate.com/

I've not heard of slate before. Glancing at the front page, it looks very interesting. I'll definitely take a closer look, thank you.

Lotus Improv and Apple's descendant of it have a better model IMHO. At the very least making formulas a top level construct avoids countless "oops I accidentally updated that cell" errors. But the locked in value effect of Excel is enormous.

"things it should definitely not be doing (massive files, enormously complex formulas)"

Massive files especially is something Excel "should not be doing" for superficial technical reasons that are mostly unrelated to whether the UI is a good fit. "Enormously complex formulas" do call for better editors, but again don't damn the model.

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