[sevensor]

I discovered named ranges only a couple of months ago, and they’re pretty amazing, as is the spilling behavior that fills an entire column from one cell. When it comes to the specifics of dealing with complex formulas, I usually copy paste them to a text editor because the formula bar doesn’t have a great editing ui.

How far did you get with let and lambda? It seems like you could build whole programs on them, but I haven’t pushed very hard on them yet. Do you want to say more about the “heavy technical limitations”?

[harperlee]

Yes, I don't think Excel product owners are focusing on professional development, just power users. So things like the formula bar are lackluster. There is also a formula stepper that's mostly useless for debugging.

I played with them and even tried to build a minikanren, but on my day to day job I just use them tactically, so I avoid their limitations and I'm quite happy with them for that.

From memory:

  - Recursion is severely limited in lambda.
  - There are extra pains when putting formulas on the name manager or on conditional formatting (although more focused on references than on lambdas in particular, usage of lambda would be more powerful if they didn't exist)
  - You can't do arrays of arrays, so your data structures need to be flat

[sevensor]

Thanks for the report! I was hoping for better news, but I can’t say I’m surprised.