[kpierce]

Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted without validation.

[Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse of original hypothesis.](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...)

Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity seems to keep excel in control.

[thrtythreeforty]

Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has.

Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB log file. I'll just use grep, or build a CSV and deal with Excel filtering.

Airtable should be awesome at reducing the cost of database-ifying these random datasets to zero. But the sales constraints put it in this niche where it's not the default tool of choice.

[bram2w]

You might want to try out Baserow (https://baserow.io). It’s an open source alternative to Airtable, backed by a PostgreSQL database. Main differences are that you can self host it with unlimited rows, it’s modular and it’s made to handle high volumes of data.

Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow.

[oehpr]

100%

I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just...

UGH.

Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation.

There HAS to be a unfilled niche here.

nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I'm watching it like a hawk.

[aidos]

I also think it’s just kinda clunky compared to excel or Google sheets. Maybe if you get used to it it’s ok to work with, but I guess you run into the issue that any friction makes it a hard sell to those who are used to excel.

[aitoehigie]

I am currently working on a CLI that will allow you to query .csv, .xls and .tsv files and SQL tables via plain English.

[dhruvarora013]

Yeah their monetization strategy is extremely puzzling. As a casual user I loved their Chrome extension that lets me grab data and put it into a sheet in a click but it only lasted as long as my Pro membership. All of the advanced features seem to be locked behind a subscription.

[bliteben]

Wonder how much the lack of pirating or using a friends out of date version prevents ubiquity.

[mackrevinack]

apparently grist can handle 100,000 rows, and that's just a soft limit so you might be able to do more.

being able to have an excel grid and a chart view on the same page would probably suit your use case as well. being able to use python for the formulas is a nice touch too.

the free hosted version has almost all features available as far as i remember. there's also a docker version that's easy to get up and running and doesn't have any limitations

[conductr]

> Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality...

Would it? At the end of the day, someone else still has to proofread and QA the commands/formulas/program or it's just blind trust that the decision is being made on. Trust (or ignorance) that the creator knew what they were doing and developed it in an accurate way before action is taken on the decision being made. The interface really makes no difference, it's the human component and "process" for creation that needs to be fine tuned. Things like the London whale situation was a process failure where one person had too much power to execute trades without oversight, review, QA, testing, etc. [0] All things that are pretty standard in a software developer's day-to-day but the rest of the world has not realized or adjusted to the fact that they are now software developers too.

[0] Excel wasn't the problem with the London whale at all, they made a mathematical error "modelers divided by a sum instead of an average"

[TAForObvReasons]

The tools are scapegoats.

The Reinhart-Rogoff issue was technically an error in Excel, but also an error by the authors for not actually verifying the results before publishing. It didn't hurt that their particular biases were in line with the results.

The technical problem can be addressed with more warnings and safeguards, but they are meaningless if no one uses them.

[Psyladine]

Go farther. Would the results have ever been validated if the source of truth was not a universal format easily interpretable by millions?

[woah]

I think that more precision over application of formulas would solve a lot. Arrays are mapped over by copying the code for each array element by dragging it across a row of cells, and the arguments to the formula are automatically mutated based on where the code is dragged to. This can be error prone.

More concrete definitions of where a formula should apply would be good, for example, leave the formula cell in one place and specify that one argument should come from this range of cells and the other from this range of cells, and the output should be mapped to this range.

[Dyac]

Give https://exploratory.io/ a look. It's free/cheap.

It's a nice easy GUI wrapper for R and just works.

I stumbled across it a year ago and now use it daily.

[__mharrison__]

I don't feel that Python is out of reach for most who are using Excel with vlookups. I do feel that most Pandas code is poorly written and thus not at all compelling to replace Excel.

(My background is that I teach Python and Data Science to large corps.)

[abrazensunset]

+1, the Pandas API is somewhere between mediocre and bad, and results in garbage code unless you use it in a carefully constrained way (which is admittedly true of many complete languages, much less libraries that organically evolved several tooling generations ago)

[gervwyk]

Not sure I agree, but interesting, so who is your target audience in large corps?