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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read some comment about how people shouldn't use excel for complex calculations and should use relational databases or Python or whatever else, I'll know why it will never happen.

It's really easy to implement the easy parts of spreadsheets, getting the hard parts right is why Excel continues to dominate the space.

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There is a good reason why no one has unseated excel: it's easy to build the really easy 80%, but the last 20% is incredibly difficult and time consuming.

It's a shame Scheme in a grid appears to be abandoned (if anyone manages to build it under, say, the latest Debian Stable, please let me know):

http://siag.nu/siag/

Most spreadsheets I've dealt with don't hold relational data. Are there people who use them as such? Sure. But I don't think that's the typical use case.

I would say relational data is the dominant use case for spreadsheets. It's a natural fit given the rows and columns. What other kind of data do you see in spreadsheets? Hierarchical data is not a great fit for spreadsheets.

Ironically, Excel fails miserably at implementing the easy parts of a database.

Seriously, how much does doing a simple "Select Distinct" suck in Excel?

So much that I wrote this: http://scpike.com/uniqify/

(I know you can do filter => unique only => copy somewhere) but it's stupidly slow.

Either way, filters aren't a solution if you're constructing a reusable spreadsheet that somebody else is populating.

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