In other words, one of the core use cases for a spreadsheet is that it empowers a broad swathe of users (broader than Tableau or PowerBI) to quickly extract insights from their data to fill immediate needs.
Or at least, that's a core use case if you can get your data into a spreadsheet without too much trouble.
The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or desire to improve it to be more reliable and maintainable.
At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that maybe we should invest more into this critical business process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.
I imagine that's because it's not really a technical problem, but an issue with how the whole organization (mis)handles complexity, and we collectively [1] still struggle to model/name a lot of those problems.
[1] Yeah yeah, I see you there in the back, you excited cyberneticist bubbling with enthusiasm to share... but I mean as a practical widespread matter.
As I see it the limitations of spreadsheets are what keep them from becoming the official way of doing things. At some point most of the stuff in the spreadsheets has data provenance in a properly managed IT system somewhere. If companies could get rid of this part of IT they would suddenly find themselves in a trillion dollar pit of lost money/inventory, As the spreadsheet mess spiraled out of control with no source of truth.
Other software that I use and write is version controlled and has tests to catch errors, mistakes, typos. Those tests regularly find and prevent problems! Likewise version control.
Could we get the same with spreadsheets? Seems difficult but not conceptually impossible, particularly with LLM assistance.
Also I remember Row Zero the demo on your home page was impressive. You guys were S3 engineers too, good to know your project took off. :)
You can create a super quick Python app with visualization and whatnot in about the same time as a spreadsheet. But then it's not online. And it's not best practice.
Web is just a fucking beast and then developers go in and add additional complexity.
It would probably be a much simpler web app if you made it just, like, a bunch of PHP scripts thrown in a folder. But they won't do that.
If someone shares a sheet with me, it’s for the intended purpose of sharing data and/or visualizations of that data.
I’ve always been a huge fan of spreadsheets, and the rare times I’ve encountered them being misused, it was a long time ago, and not near enough to make me an “anti-spreadsheet” person.
It sounds like these anti-spreadsheet people need to find a new place to work and/or new coworkers.
Either way people shouldn’t be anti-spreadsheets because some people misuse them. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re a great tool for tracking/sharing/visualizing data.
It happens all the time where I work. I don't want to be specific, but we have lots of examples here. In some cases people don't like the core software, so they work around it by tracking things on a spreadsheet. And sometimes that spreadsheet disappears (in one case, it was being kept on an XLSX on a USB thumb drive, but the thumb drive got corrupted and we lost some very important data.)
To say that it was a nightmare was an understatement. They were willing to dump vast sums of money to get something better, but they'd homebrewed so many human processes to deal with the spreadsheet that they struggled to adapt to a more conventional way of doing things.
With that said, it's still a great tool for the job because the different stakeholders can inspect it.
Lol. Go to literally any bank. They all have a legion of accountant,analyists that's sole job is to maintain their little fiefdom of spreadsheets that only they understand.
If most people knew just how held together by string,tape and gum the banking industry is there would be a run on the banks.
There is also always some 75+yo part time guy that maintains some sort of critical system. He always says, "I want to retire but they keep throwing more money at me"
Otherwise, I find them to be great deliverables.
Even though Excel is proprietary too, it's ubiquitous enough that people don't have to worry about it.
And then, if somebody makes a change in the database, a trigger will update the spreadsheet
Such a two-way binding makes it possible to continue relying on spreadsheets for UX, all the while the data is not locked in there and we can also have other processes handling the data (a web app, some cron job, etc)
Maybe market it as an API for excel or something
See here to understand what you are missing out by not using a database: https://visualdb.com/comparison/#integrity
though, much programming is poor and often can be accomplished better in a spreadsheet given the situation and use case...
I think even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders is preferred.
If the business stakeholders can edit said spreadsheet, they can code. Not well probably, but they can.
So, theoretically, they should be able to open a python script or whatever and hack away. A lot of calculations are actually much easier and straightforward in a real language as opposed to Excel.
But they won't, partially because developers would never let them.