Hah, AI-written summary? (Using Buzzfeed's 1-sentence-per-paragraph-for-fifth-grade-reading-skills style). The author is "msexcel, Bronze Contributor", and if I click the username I get a "Cannot find current user" (1).
Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.
(1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...
Not really. I get what you are saying, and with discipline you could emulate depth with sheets. But it would only be by convention and I don’t think many functions worked that way.
Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels.
This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.
Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?
Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature is a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.
Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.
I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.
Microsoft is actively harming the laypersons comprehension of their data with 'features' such as this.
Reasoning about the basic shape of data with real estate managers using the Btrieve[0] database on DOS (and then XP) in years gone by was noticeably more straight forward than wrangling the monolithic excel monstrosities encountered today.
There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.
Excel does not need to be as opinionated or portable as a programming language. This might actually be a lesser of two evils considering what type of user behavior it encourages. (I've heard a similar ethos behind certain design decisions of Go)
I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.
But treesheets isn’t used by millions of office workers across the globe. I doubt treesheets is know by 2% of the HN audience. So it just doesn’t make the news.
Or was the point you knew an obscure fact about an obscure application?
The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.
And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.
EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.
I’ve recently been experimenting with OnlyOffice as a non-excel alternative that can still support a broad formula set and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. I want to be able to use an open source spreadsheet system and onlyoffice is surprisingly robust.
I’m a very occasional and casual user of office programs. Mostly I don’t use them.
What I like about OnlyOffice over LibreOffice is the UI. I like how it’s one program that can open all the documents rather than a collection of different programs as well. It feels clean, simple, and modern.
A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine. But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?
Is it that I complained in the way I stated something? Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time), I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here.
What would be a revolution in excel is if we could have probability distributions in cells. Right now all spreadsheets are fairly deterministic and we think that tells us something about the real world. Having an ability to make cells distributions (and then all resultant cells would be distributions too) would represent the uncertainty in the world better (and expose lots of interesting things like distributions of tails)
What would this look like? Whenever I need something like that, I just stick each parameter in its own cell and use functions from there.
I would love an easier way to communicate to tech/math-illiterate CEOs that worst case, average case, and best case are different things, but must all be planned for.
Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
When I did Process Improvement we used MiniTab for this.
I honestly was not a fan of that program and would have loved to be able to use Excel, but there are so many statistical things you just can't do in it.
I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.
Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.
It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.
This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.
Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.
Were you able to process truly large datasets? I worked at a very excel company once but we kept running into row limit issues when scaling workloads and eventually migrated almost everything away from it. What industry were you in at the time?
The same thing that works for databases also works for excel. You shard the data and run your analysis on the set of shards in excel. It's not elegant, but can solve many problems.
I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly used a tool up until 2020 that was originally created in Excel 97.
MATLAB was the runner up for our tools but the good part about Excel was that every PC had it whereas MATLAB wasn't and also needed network access for the license (or else your program/department had to buy a node license). Later, many people switched to python since not everyone loves MATLAB and it's more of a real software language (and it's free) than what's effectively a very expensive calculator.
I was skeptical, but this looks genuinely useful. I can already think of some use-cases for this, e.g. a spreadsheet I was working on recently had a list of user, and then a comma-separated list of software apps they were using. It was a bit of a nightmare to parse, but the example in the article would definitely help with filtering the list.
It makes me gleeful to see Microsoft adding genuinely new and useful features to their standard products. Whether true or not, it feels like it's been such a long time..
And something that isn't AI or an advertising opportunity…
Though they have been slowly adding useful new features to Excel (auto- spill is one I occasionally find to be both a time saver and a mistake reducer) for a few years now, after a long time seemingly doing very little with it. While I'm all for things having a "done" state and after that not doing much with them so as to not break a good thing, there is plenty of room for little improvements like new functions (admittedly many of them likely a bit niche) in Excel, just as long as they don't break what already works at the same time.
Hah, AI-written summary? (Using Buzzfeed's 1-sentence-per-paragraph-for-fifth-grade-reading-skills style). The author is "msexcel, Bronze Contributor", and if I click the username I get a "Cannot find current user" (1).
Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.
(1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...
Is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider... better? We could swap the URLs.
Edit: I swapped the URLs.
You already had sheets in the workbook for depth
I’d like to be able to make a cell into a sheet… like a subsidiary schedule
Not really. I get what you are saying, and with discipline you could emulate depth with sheets. But it would only be by convention and I don’t think many functions worked that way.
Index does at least, which is pretty huge.
This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.
Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?
I have, at the risk of being a meme, put spreadsheets in cells via OLE. It was glorious.
Can you extract values from the embedded spreadsheets to do math in the host sheet?
What was that syntax like?
About time! Should have done this from the start instead of spill. That and being able to index into the multiple values in a cell.
But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?
Weird, because I remember a job where we had arrays in Excel cells back in 2008.
These arrays are IN A SINGLE CELL
You could call a named range or ctrl+shift+enter to run an array command. You couldn't put a defined array in a single cell, it would read at text.
Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature is a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.
Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.
I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.
If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.
won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk
I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.
Microsoft is actively harming the laypersons comprehension of their data with 'features' such as this.
Reasoning about the basic shape of data with real estate managers using the Btrieve[0] database on DOS (and then XP) in years gone by was noticeably more straight forward than wrangling the monolithic excel monstrosities encountered today.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrieve
There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.
Excel does not need to be as opinionated or portable as a programming language. This might actually be a lesser of two evils considering what type of user behavior it encourages. (I've heard a similar ethos behind certain design decisions of Go)
The flexibility of Excel is a lot of its value. If it wasn’t flexible like this then how could it be so widespread as a general purpose business tool?
Excel allows and embraces whatever mess you want to make.
Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/
And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?
So?
I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.
But treesheets isn’t used by millions of office workers across the globe. I doubt treesheets is know by 2% of the HN audience. So it just doesn’t make the news.
Or was the point you knew an obscure fact about an obscure application?
I suppose it shows that it's not an outright innovation in this space, for whatever that is worth.
The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.
And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.
EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.
I'm sure someone has already coined a law something like this:
The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.
In a rigid lattice, aye.
I’ve recently been experimenting with OnlyOffice as a non-excel alternative that can still support a broad formula set and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. I want to be able to use an open source spreadsheet system and onlyoffice is surprisingly robust.
Are you familiar with LibreOffice? Are there any advantages that OnlyOffice has over other open source spreadsheets?
Same thing
I’m a very occasional and casual user of office programs. Mostly I don’t use them.
What I like about OnlyOffice over LibreOffice is the UI. I like how it’s one program that can open all the documents rather than a collection of different programs as well. It feels clean, simple, and modern.
Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.
It’s good for the economy.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a valid and well considered comment. It’s not your role to police opinion, dang.
Quite! And fortunately I don't know what the opinion is.
It turns out that, with practice, you can read comments along one axis and not another. And boy do we practice.
Not really sure on this, dang.
A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine. But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?
Is it that I complained in the way I stated something? Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time), I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here.
What would be a revolution in excel is if we could have probability distributions in cells. Right now all spreadsheets are fairly deterministic and we think that tells us something about the real world. Having an ability to make cells distributions (and then all resultant cells would be distributions too) would represent the uncertainty in the world better (and expose lots of interesting things like distributions of tails)
What would this look like? Whenever I need something like that, I just stick each parameter in its own cell and use functions from there.
I would love an easier way to communicate to tech/math-illiterate CEOs that worst case, average case, and best case are different things, but must all be planned for.
Its a paid add-on but @Risk gives the functionality you're looking for
Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
When I did Process Improvement we used MiniTab for this.
I honestly was not a fan of that program and would have loved to be able to use Excel, but there are so many statistical things you just can't do in it.
Reminds me of Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
When I read this post earlier, I immediately thought, "don't cross the streams."
it's the Baghavad Gita, which Oppenheimer quoted. there's a wikipedia link...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#/media/File:Trin...
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
nooo Oppenheimer, you prevented needless world war
by having nukes we prevent world war 3, see british operation unthinkable
Excel just got a z-axis. Cool.
They already had that with 3D formulas. (Not even kidding... you can sum the same range across multiple spreadsheet tabs)
I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.
Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.
It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.
This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.
Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.
Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.
You underestimate the task by multiple orders of magnitude. It would be a significant effort even to build it on libreoffice.
Were you able to process truly large datasets? I worked at a very excel company once but we kept running into row limit issues when scaling workloads and eventually migrated almost everything away from it. What industry were you in at the time?
The same thing that works for databases also works for excel. You shard the data and run your analysis on the set of shards in excel. It's not elegant, but can solve many problems.
I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly used a tool up until 2020 that was originally created in Excel 97.
MATLAB was the runner up for our tools but the good part about Excel was that every PC had it whereas MATLAB wasn't and also needed network access for the license (or else your program/department had to buy a node license). Later, many people switched to python since not everyone loves MATLAB and it's more of a real software language (and it's free) than what's effectively a very expensive calculator.
I didn't read this, but it could already hold tons of values in one cell? Can someone explain what they are 'supporting' now?
Codd wept.
I was skeptical, but this looks genuinely useful. I can already think of some use-cases for this, e.g. a spreadsheet I was working on recently had a list of user, and then a comma-separated list of software apps they were using. It was a bit of a nightmare to parse, but the example in the article would definitely help with filtering the list.
It makes me gleeful to see Microsoft adding genuinely new and useful features to their standard products. Whether true or not, it feels like it's been such a long time..
And something that isn't AI or an advertising opportunity…
Though they have been slowly adding useful new features to Excel (auto- spill is one I occasionally find to be both a time saver and a mistake reducer) for a few years now, after a long time seemingly doing very little with it. While I'm all for things having a "done" state and after that not doing much with them so as to not break a good thing, there is plenty of room for little improvements like new functions (admittedly many of them likely a bit niche) in Excel, just as long as they don't break what already works at the same time.
So they added support for and a nice UI on JSON data types in database fields.
That may sound reductive and dismissive, but I think that's actually pretty cool and likely to make some things a lot easier.