I agree with a lot of the points raised here. I think many of the problems with spreadsheets are due to the software rather than the users. As mentioned in the article, its hard to slowly iterate from a small manageable spreadsheet to an larger software solution.

For example, Excel would be a lot more usable and maintainable for me if there was a way to make a special "data sheet" in which data types are forced to be consistent within columns and there was a concept of column names. Still GUI-based and user-friendly. That would encourage a logical seperation between data entry, data output, and computations. In my experience, the main challenge of helping users with spreadsheets is when they create spaghetti code that mixes data and computation together.

One aspect that is rarely talked about is that Excel is really good for developers who know about data/stats/business/databases but don't know about frontend app development.

Excel thrived in banks, not because traders used it, but because IT/Quant people used it. It's so much more straightforward to build a UI in Excel than with React. Just type things in cells, then wire them with simple VBA buttons. Of course there are things you can't do, but for the purposes of a bank, it's very rare that you find one.

So if I am a quant, I don't need to go to the frontend guy, trying to explain to him what a "vega" is and why I would want to multiply by notional/vol to change the units. This is a huuuuge time saver. And you can change your UI anytime. Just open the file, add a column, click save and it's done.

At some point, banks knew that fat-finger-mistakes could cost them fortunes, and the lack of auditing was terrible. But they had to force traders to switch off their sheets by threatening them with internal fines (we'll charge you $2m for running things with Excel). So traders complied, but then they got into years-long projects, to create shitty shitty web apps, that couldn't do half of what Excel had built-in. Every change would need to go through an approval process, and it's unclear whether these systems had less bugs than spreadsheet did.

The first thing they wanted when the project was done? "Give me a button to export to Excel".

For the shameless plug part, I am building a tool to try and bridge code and spreadsheet (https://www.jigdev.com). Lmk if you have comments/suggestions.

This article is BS. As others have noted, it is a straw man argument.

Everyone uses spreadsheets, including developers. I use them. I'm not going to spend 50 hours coding when I can create a spreadsheet in 5 minutes.

Of course, the issue is when things get complicated, as the author and others here have noted.

Creating a CRM from spreadsheets is pure madness, for example, when there are so many other options that exist, without having to custom program.

For me, whenever you have a one-to-many or many-to-many situation, that's where spreadsheets, to me, fall apart.

I personally have used spreadsheets to do my finances, but only because I was too lazy to scope out different bookkeeping systems. I'm fairly expert in accounting, too. I've used a LOT of different accounting systems, and installed and trained people on them. But there's no way that one can get up and running as fast as one can by using Quickbooks or other accounting systems, in terms of all the report features, etc.

Pre-defined apps are fairly unchangeable, but unless one has critical information that depends on a custom solution, it's better to shoehorn your business into a pre-existing app. I do admit that. Very few small and medium sized businesses require that, though, I've never seen one yet that can't use a prior existing solution. Though there might be, but only very, very small percentage, like, less than 1%. However, a large Fortune 1000 enterprise could have stuff they need custom programming, because of the scale. But I don't have any experience with enterprise organizations so I can't comment on that. Maybe SAP or whatever is good for them, I don't know.

Can't disagree. Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful tools and the barrier to entry is very low.

The only situation I can think of where you should discourage their use is in those situations where you know for sure in advance that the application is going to outgrow the spreadsheet very soon and/or immediately. If you are building a new microservice that will serve a million customers per day, don't make the mockup in a spreadsheet.

If you have had to fill multiple, spreadsheet-based, customers' InfoSec questionnaire about your SaaS product, including the need for tailored, multi-paragraph answers (ie: you can't copy/paste from stock responses), you might disagree with the raw headline.

There's a real back-and-forth struggle for me with spreadsheets. I find people very frequently reach for them for things that they do really well: data slicing and dicing, ordering and sorting, formulae that cross-reference cells, and so forth. However, the contents of those spreadsheets are often (for me) not numeric, but text, and working with text that's longer than a few words in Excel is still a huge PITA, even after all these years, because Excel still thinks of the contents of cells as numbers first.

Consider the output of your average audit. You'll have tables of findings, each of which needs a due date, a risk rating, a description of the problem, a description of the solution, auditor notes, customer comments, responsible party assignments, and so forth. (Yes, those would eventually go well in a tool like Jira, but that's for later--this is coming out of an audit visit.)

From a data standpoint, putting those in a spreadsheet makes sense: you can now order the findings by date or risk rating, hide ones that don't apply, cross-reference findings between visits, and so forth. However, from a text perspective, it's awful: the descriptions might run to multiple paragraphs, comments and instructions need more complicated formatting than just "bold or italic", some fields should be constrained on content while others need to be free-form, and so forth. All of those things work much better in a Word table than in Excel cells, but putting the content in Word utterly removes the ability to data-manipulate. So you wind up either creating some Frankenstein hybrid solution or with crushing one perspective to satisfy the other.

If Microsoft wants a win for Excel, making it an order of magnitude easier to deal with free-form text in cells would be an enormous step forward.

We need a spreadsheet format that's more conducive to the professional programmer workflow.

Parsing them is actually very complex. You just have to hope your library can handle everything in excel. If you're a cli native I'm not really sure what you do.

Spreadsheets don't play very will with source control. If the underlying format was text and every cell and formula was on a new line it would work out ok. As it is now, merging them is very cumbersome....impossible for the laymen that might be the main user of the sheet.

By going with a speadsheet and not something like SQL, you lose a lot of rigor.

There's probably a few more needs but these are top of mind for me.

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.

Article raises some valid points but how do you catch the point where the spreadsheet gets out of control? Maybe MS could build in a warning system and then suggest some potential solutions.

Minor quibble: it's an Apple III in the ad, not an Apple ][ as the post says. I remember running Visicalc on my Apple ][ but it wasn't until Excel appeared that I realized how seductive spreadsheets can be.

As a product manager, spreadsheets have been an incredible asset to build products when I had limited resources and to iterate quickly.

When we had no front-end devs available - we used Googles sheets API, connected our spreadsheets to our production DB, and did all the input of raw data, and ingestion of outputs automatically. User interaction happened within the spreadsheets.

When FE devs opened up, we eventually built the UI to replace the spreadsheet (Which is a very hard task, spreadsheets are good at what they do). But by this point, we knew exactly what we needed in the ux and had iterated on the ux multiple times.

My issue with spreadsheets is that they don't encourage reproducible science. For example, if you write code in R or python to log transform your data, you can look at the code and see that it has been done. If you have a spreadsheet that you (or worse, someone else) has created, you can maybe look at the values and guess it has been log transformed, but you can't know for certain that was the case and no other transformations were applied.

One thing I'm surprised hasn't taken off is something like Framework. Framework was a hybrid word processor/spreadsheet/database/graphics/communications program based around the unifying concept of a frame, all scriptable in a Lisp-like programming language from which every frame -- down to individual spreadsheet cells which counted as frames -- was directly addressable. Frames could even serve as sources of input or sinks for output to/from external programs or remote machines.

Framework was pretty much Emacs for the office, and such was its power that unlike contemporary spreadsheets and word processors, which were usually positioned as productivity tools for generating business documents and reports, Framework was explicitly marketed as a decision making tool for executives. It did well in markets such as Europe where Lotus hadn't taken over, but it just about died when the Windows era started.

Spreadsheets versus programmers is a war that can be much more peaceful. In my work, I have found that, especially in data science, the spreadsheet user and the programmers are often trying to accomplish similar tasks, but the “language barrier” between them leads to much more fragmented workflows. I also think this article does a good job of identifying spreadsheets as a low-code programming language — spreadsheets are immensely powerful pieces of software. Along these lines — I’ve been building Mito (https://trymito.io/), a spreadsheet GUI for Python. Every edit you make in the spreadsheet generates the equivalent Python code.

I think a lot of the "problems" with using large scale spreadsheets can be somewhat ameliorated by moving the underlying data to a proper database and then using the spreadsheet as a GUI / interactive analytical tool. Now that you can make external API calls in Excel[1], this actually seems doable.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/...

We are getting pretty crazy with our use of Excel documents these days. With a little bit of OpenXML magic, you can read/write these things from code. I'm not talking about CSV either. I am talking about full-blown XLSX files, where you can control font/color/size/worksheets/et.al. with a few lines of logic.

Once you are able to read & write excel documents with a piece of software, you can do some pretty fucking incredible things.

Imagine being able to click a single button and download a total configuration output for a customer's environment (maybe 20-30 worksheets auto-generated in seconds). You can then email this human readable document to the customer for modifications. You then feed this back into the system to load their adjusted values (there is a diff/check-in report to confirm first).

The reason we and our customers like this approach is because there is a lot of configuration where we need to compare lists of things and slice parts of one thing into another. It makes replicating success absolutely trivial. Being able to style the document is a much bigger benefit than you would probably think at first. CSV is trivial to employ, but it is very constrained on this front. For a developer who is familiar, color & layout doesn't move the needle much. For a customer who has no clue how the back-end works, these things make all the difference in the universe. Things you can't edit are grey background, things you can are green, etc.

Some apps should be spreadsheets. Some spreadsheets should be apps.

It's the user's decision that's usually wrong. Not the framework in which the solution is built.

For example, at Budibase [1], we've found a high percentage of our use cases are companies upgrading their in-house spreadsheets to applications due to several reasons: Volume of data Lack of auditing Lack of control Accessibility

[1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

I have a love hate relationship with spreadsheets. While in University I was a bit of an Excel Monkey, I knew everything there was to know and I prided myself in not having to use my mouse to make complex models... Now that I worked at a major bank, learned to code and moved to the data science side I despise spreadsheets. Most people don't realize this but out entire banking system is built on a couple excel models that all the banks use - when something goes wrong its a nightmare to fix.

Recently, we've started to see a major shift away from spreadsheet models to spreadsheets being used as data dumps and then being uploaded into third party software. Usually this "software" tends to be nothing more than some SQL and python scripts behind a fancy UI. I would personally prefer the banks to continue using Excel sheets and then pay for their employees to learn basic python and SQL but that's too simple and the SaaS sales guys have their claws firmly embedded in the upper levels of most orgs.

Spreadsheets are the original low-code/no-code platforms! There's something magical about showing a non-coding subject matter expert a few Excel tips and watching them subsequently visualize and automate a process on a spreadsheet. Also, looking at spreadsheets built by non-coders is a great way to spur software/start-up ideas.

Every CRM starts with a spreadsheet or every applicant tracking system starts with spreadsheet. Many organizations love to start with spreadsheet and then evolve to application (Ready or custom).

At https://www.dronahq.com we support 1. users to connect to their spreadsheets and build applications on top. or pull data from multiple datasources e.g. spreadsheets and support ticket system and build custom tool.

2. We understand people love columnar database like spreadsheet or airtable.com, hence we offer an built-in database called 'sheets'

3. We support most excel formula and functions for binding data or writing complex business logic i.e Logical Functions, Date and Time Functions, Text Functions, Math Functions, custom functions

Spreadsheet programs are incredibly powerful. I was a math education minor and one of the classes I remember most was using computers in the classroom and using spreadsheets to do things that aren't obvious like estimate square roots. (well at least not obvious to me)

However, I think spreadsheet programs are still way to complex for the vast majority of people. So many people are so math phobic that they won't even think of opening a spreadsheet.

One thing I've done with a spreadsheet a few dozen times is take the outputted CVS file my learning management system gives me in the form of last name, first name and convert it to first last in one cell. I still have to find the bookmarked answer I found years ago and cut and paste it in and I don't really understand how it works.

Please no!

Spreadsheets are broken. It's easy to be at error due to calculation issues, which you'll only find out when manually going over it. It's a calculator that can't properly calculate. Many business have made huge mistakes due to it.

Never ever use it for financial calculations.

At Stacker (YC S20) we do something kind of in between, hoping to catch usecases where people need an actual app just as they are outgrowing the spreadsheet, by allowing you to build an app... from your spreadsheet!

It should be interesting for anyone who's done a lot of thinking* about the relationship between spreadsheets, no code, and custom software. Check us out: https://stackerhq.com

* if this is you, and you're really interested, we're hiring. Email in my profile :-)

Spreadsheet is incredibly powerful

However, if your use case is narrower (e.g. only use CSVs), there are more suitable tools.

As a person who knows how to code, using a real programming language or SQL is way way better.

To that end, I've built a Desktop app that enables you to work with CSV using SQL here: https://superintendent.app

For what it's worth, I've now seen a couple times where the spreadsheet becomes too large and somebody hooks the spreadsheet up to a database so it does queries. That seems to work well for the users willing and able to learn some SQL, and it confuses most others which results in some really strange spreadsheets...

So Alan Kay was right about live coding, at least for the average person, but he was wrong about what kind of software. That or SmallTalk with spreadsheets would be the killer low-code app. Lotus Notes also made use of @ formulas for it's forms, and then there was Hyper Card for easily building GUIs.

Spreadsheet users are programmers. Shouldn't be a war.

But, the problem with spreadsheets is that they are an engine of shoddy programming. I don't think it's fundamental. All currently existing spreadsheet implementations hide their functions and make review difficult. If we had spreadsheets that somehow exposed the relations between the cells and made them easier to inspect, ideally minimizing selective interaction (obviously you can mouseover, but that is a far more selective interaction than scrolling a file), they would be less of a problem.

To some degree notebooks (matlab/mathematica/octave, jupyter, pluto, livebook) are solving this problem, and probably being "halfway-between" spreadsheets code, with being fully reviewable is a game-changer, why data scientists like them.

I think you could also improve on the spreadsheet in other ways by being more opinionated. You could have each table be a named entity not on an "infinite-plane of cells" (so you have to set the # of rows and columns, obviously should still be easy to insert/remove rows and columns). I am sure I am not alone in thinking for the last 3 decades that graphs just "hanging out in the middle of the cells" is really stupid.

What is especially ironic is that excel is not so straighforward to use in my experience. If you want to do something in excel that you don't know how to do, you are best off finding a search engine and looking for a 5 minute article that explains everything. Now, programming is seen as toohard for some reason, but if you were to look for how to do that exact same merge or join or barplot or whatever in, say, python or R, I bet it would be another 5 minute article no longer than the excel one. It begs the question, why use excel at all when the learning curve isn't any easier than learning a few functions in python or R? The answer in my opinion is only that its entrenched and familiar, and you have entire companies basing everything on their excel spreadsheets since 1995 because they were told then by advertisers that this is how business should be done on computers. And now we have generations of accountants and business majors going through undergrad and spending braincells and tuition dollars for coursework on the shitware that is excel, rather than learning something like R or python that they could use to create an infinite number of innovative or creative things beyond just parsing a spreadsheet.

    from matplotlib import pyplot as plt    
        
    # Pie chart, where the slices will be ordered and plotted counter-clockwise:    
    Aus_Players = 'Smith', 'Finch', 'Warner', 'Lumberchane'    
    Runs = [42, 32, 18, 24]    
    explode = (0.1, 0, 0, 0)  # it "explode" the 1st slice     
        
    fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()    
    ax1.pie(Runs, explode=explode, labels=Aus_Players, autopct='%1.1f%%',    
            shadow=True, startangle=90)    
    ax1.axis('equal')  # Equal aspect ratio ensures that pie is drawn as a circle.    
        
    plt.show()

Mito looks very interesting. I couldn't find pricing info. Is this open source?