[s_kilk]

In my experience working in some "speadsheet heavy" businesses:

- complecting 'data' and 'presentation of data' together

- lack of tools to help with 'correctness'

- lack of version control

- horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.

- spreadsheets full of pivots and charts rapidly become the 'truth' of a business, but without any checks and balances to ensure that what they show is actually true, leading to confusion and great badness.

[harperlee]

I would add a couple of things:

I'd like asserts / rules / invariants / constrains that alert me when they are no longer valid. Everyone implements this with conditional formatting to get them red.

Related, I don't like having three coding spaces: the cell value, the format formula, and possibly vba.

Also, the whole book/sheet/cell hierarchy is very limited. Complex formatting is complicated when a simple fix would do: just let me compose views of several sheets, so I can put tables side-by-side without the need for them to be aligned, break when I add columns to one table, etc. Support for tree-like structures is done typically by merging parent cells to span more. Just support trees as an alternative to tables! If the layout on point 3 would exist, this would be beautiful. A structure would be book/object-set-layout/cell, where objects can be: a tree, a table, etc. Formatting is part of an object and can be more easily templated, code is referenced, not created, in the objects, and is all apart - vba style. ResolverOne had this last one right. Having all code apart would mean easier version control, and easier separation of logic/presentation/data. Lastly, you could link objects from separate locations and authorization, and have a federated data model. But now I'm just overarchitecting :).

[noxToken]

> horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.

I don't remember where I read this, but I heard that the basic Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is written with office workers in mind first. That is, Word isn't written for authors, Excel isn't written for database managers/big data specialists, and PowerPoint isn't written for motivational speakers.

I think the idea of the basic Office Suite is that a user could grasp the basic functionality of the software without having to undergo any training. Second to that, tools and other functionality for those with specific needs (e.g. pseudo-database functionality, basic data visualization in Excel) could use the software where the project was small enough. Excel was given great programming features without a proper programming language to support it.

This isn't to say that these programs are not feature packed or bad. They're kitchen sinks that want to make everyone happy.

[collyw]

The problem is that they are too easy to use. As such Excel gets used for everything data related. Access would be a far better choice in many of the cases I have seen, but it just doesn't make any sense unless you have had some sort of introductory course on databases.