Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017)

37 points

9 years ago

Was just Googling around for whether Excel (sans VBA scripting of course) is Turing-complete, in order to decide whether telling a layperson that Excel (or spreadsheeting in general) can be considered very much like programming. Came across this 2009 HN thread, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?" from pg:

> One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477

What significant advances -- in Excel/spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What's the YC startup from that cycle that "is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet", and what is it doing today? I remember Grid [0], but that was from 2012. Any other companies make innovations that would overturn the spreadsheet paradigm, or at least be copied by Excel/OO/GSheets?

A commenter mentioned "Queries", since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses "principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) to do searches). The function has been around since 2015 (according to Internet Archive [2]) so perhaps I ignored it because its description then was simply, "Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data."

It appears that "Visualization API Query Language" has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].

edit: Multiple people said they would like Excel to have online functionality, i.e. like Google Sheets, but being able to accept VBA and any other features of legacy Excel spreadsheets. There's now Excel Online but I haven't used it (still sticking to Office 2011 for Mac if I ever need to use Excel instead of GS). How seamless is the transition from offline, legacy Excel files to online Excel?

[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the/

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150319144449/https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en

[3] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage

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