I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.

Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature of a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.

Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.

Reminds me of Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

What would be a revolution in excel is if we could have probability distributions in cells. Right now all spreadsheets are fairly deterministic and we think that tells us something about the real world. Having an ability to make cells distributions (and then all resultant cells would be distributions too) would represent the uncertainty in the world better (and expose lots of interesting things like distributions of tails)

Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.

Excel just got a z-axis. Cool.

Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/

I’ve recently been experimenting with OnlyOffice as a non-excel alternative that can still support a broad formula set and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. I want to be able to use an open source spreadsheet system and onlyoffice is surprisingly robust.

The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

About time! Should have done this from the start instead of spill. That and being able to index into the multiple values in a cell.

Weird, because I remember a job where we had arrays in Excel cells back in 2008.

But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?

> Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels.

This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.

Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?

Hah, AI-written summary? (Using Buzzfeed's 1-sentence-per-paragraph-for-fifth-grade-reading-skills style). The author is "msexcel, Bronze Contributor", and if I click the username I get a "Cannot find current user" (1).

Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.

(1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...