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As someone who has been to multiple trade shows to show off our own spreadsheet product that solves some of these problems (https://rowzero.io/home), I can tell you there are a bunch of data engineers and their managers who have a visceral hatred of spreadsheets but have trouble articulating any reason for it.
immibis
Feels a bit like the no-code paradox though. When you make a sufficiently advanced no-code (or no-database) tool it becomes equivalent to code (or a database) and even though it does entice a novice to start using it, a complex system made in it is still complex code (or a complex database) and ends up requiring a competent programmer (or db admin) to maintain it, who wishes it was written the normal way to begin with.
gregates OP
I have no doubt that the stories of complex spreadsheet models as the beating heart of a business are true. But those models are likely the sole survivor from a thousand dead and gone spreadsheets that people extracted value from for a time, but just didn't have the ongoing utility or wide enough audience to merit being turned into a dashboard or web app. It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

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.

bobson381
And then the attached part of this that you mentioned is that the cursed survivors have essentially outcompeted their peers for survival. They're winners of a genetic algorithm whose basis is company data. They have close contact with actual reality, and have been beaten carefully into shape by it. I have kind of a grudging respect for these because of that, actually.
encloser
> It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

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.

Terr_
> but have trouble articulating

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.

citizenpaul
I've always suspected if someone were to make a spreadsheet app that solves most spreadsheet problems it would collapse most companies.

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.

rictic
I love spreadsheets for casual stuff, but my concerns with using them for anything heavy duty are twofold: change management and correctness testing.

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.

giancarlostoro
Imagine if people used Emacs the way they use Spreadsheets. "Hey I made a way to simplify our workflow, it has forms, buttons, gizmos we need" then you go to their desk, and its some custom Elisp abomination. I have to imagine this is how most people who hate spreadsheets see them. It still works, but it's a quirky solution.

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. :)

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