Yeah. It's a pet-peeve of mine: after having been tasked to port a spreadsheet to a dedicated app, I've lost all illusions about spreadsheets.
Or, put it like this: spreadsheets are for programmers. When a non-programmer uses a spreadsheet, it's full, full, full of broken assumptions.
The famous Excel vid by Joel Spolsky shows just that: it's ultra-powerful stuff, but you basically have to be a programmer to understand what's doable and how to use that power wisely (and Joel Spolsky is a programmer himself).
Users don't understand dates and the relation between values and the values at a certain date or the values at the date of encoding or the values when they're automatically fetched, for a start.
Then they have absolutely zero clue as how to model things crossing boundaries: for example something crossing a year boundary.
I could go on and on but it's just mind-boggling. Reunions discussing the spreadsheet with "the users" and asking questions and they're just lost: they don't get it. They don't understand what they've done. It's confusion everywhere (in their minds and in their spreadsheets).
The corporate world runs on Powerpoint presentation using bogus numbers from broken spreadsheets.
Now it's nice to see a system that tries to add some sanity to spreadsheets but I fear it's like "SVN trying to be CVS done right, but it's impossible to do CVS right" (paraphrasing Torvalds).
P.S: do I use spreadsheets? You bet I do, I'm a programmer.
The brittle nature of spreadsheets is also its most powerful feature.
Can’t wait for a world full of apps as janky as most spreadsheets (or Access or FileMaker databases)
Also the OP has much about the programmatic components, but Excel is also an interface. The front end of an unofficial corporate app. And people know (they think) how to use it.
I just listened to a demo of an insurance industry SaaS that isn’t yet public. Goal to move many things out of spreadsheets. Had AI agents built in and all sorts of bells and whistles. But the screens were chaos. I immediately thought it was just too “complicated” to switch a person off the busy/messy system they know - Excel.
Everyone will be writing apps. Almost every app will be as janky as possible and people will just take the jank as the normal thing and get used to it and working around it, just like they did when every company started using electron and fake mobile apps that are wrapped buggy webpages.
With fast updates that changes every feature across updates, breaking everything and people accepting as the norm.
It's already happening:
- you can see Show HN post making it to the front page full vibecoded with as much jank as possible and the all the comments praising it and not questionning all the jank.
- I've seen it in some popular open source projects when after updates existing feature started to break constantly. The whole thing is ai coded up to the handling of bug reports and feature request and have Claude as co-commiter. I've looked in the internet to see the perception no one is complaining about it
- same at work, managers accepting slop AI solutions that are wrong at so many levels simply because it's fast and complain about the symptoms months down the line without questionning the AI part.
This was already the case even before generative AI
I work in Finance. It's routine for the folks I work adjacent to to spend literal hours performing a task using a spreadsheet. The same logic could be executed by a query engine or scripting language in seconds. But... I know from trying... it would take months if not years to accurately identify and account for all the weird exceptions and edge cases that the human operator is accounting for intuitively because of their undocumented tacit knowledge of the domain.
So while the spreadsheet itself as an artifact is a mess, and the process as a whole is gallingly inefficient... the outputs they produce are often preternaturally correct.
We have a programmer on our team who keeps trying to convert our excel calculations to more structured systems (database store). The issue is that the spreadsheet-work almost always requires navigating and making decisions based on unstructured data. The format isn't formally specified, so in the end our programmer makes more mistakes because he doesn't engage with the data - the processing gets treated as a routine algorithm, and it's not. The interactivity (and the fact that we're not spending energy on formal specification) is what allows us to more effectively engage with the data.
Another important point is that spreadsheets more easily allows you to consider data points individually without hand cuffing yourself to one kind of processing algorithm or software design. I can easily edit one cell to make a correction in a data set (which is a double-edged sword). The programmer has to create an additional handler to handle the exception. Depending on the design/quality of the code, this could just be adding undesirable complexity in the software. So we can either spend 30 seconds and edit a cell, or spend half an hour adding to code (which by the way may never get used again).