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by Vaslo
1788 days ago
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People understate the power of spreadsheets. You are literally using a visible programming language. When I have to write a algorithm to read from a file or a spreadsheet, I can model it very easily on the spreadsheet to get all my i's, j's, and k's right, and I can watch it occur incrementally line by line in a spreadsheet. When I was buying my house, I was able to easily line by line show my wife where all the cash was going. No print statement, variables, or anything I'd need in Python or C++. I could do it in 5 mins and it was as good as anything those languages could have done. All that said, I can see issues with errors that are hidden by spreadsheets but those can be handled with good spreadsheet design (i.e. NEVER EVER hard code anything into a cell) and they simply just need a way to do GIT type version control natively. We recently got the ability to have multiple people work in the same spreadsheet at a time if on MS Teams, but there's more work to do there. |
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Define 'hard code'...
Is "=MONTH(A1)+2" no good when I'm trying to write a row of every other month?
Is it bad to say '=IF(A1="USA",TRUE,FALSE)' when I'm trying to see what customers belong to our USA office?
I have this problem with coding too. In my mind, it's okay to hard code things, since you can always debug and abstract them later. Excel's "Evaluate Formula" and "Trace Precedents" are both pretty handy tools.