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What can't you do in Excel? | nadim: Some thoughts:-With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there.-Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, and maybe even restricting access within worksheets within the document. |
Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web? | jjguy: "semantic web" is a buzzword, too ill-defined to allow anyone to define themselves with it label of "semantic web programmer."The intellectual academics point at the rise of standards, structured information and shout "the semantic web is here!"The pragmatic implementers point at the reams and reams and reams of still unstructured data and wonder where the academics point.Save yourself the trouble; don't worry about what the semantic web is or isn't. Don't worry about how to leverage it. Find a problem and just solve it. |
What can't you do in Excel? | swombat: Hmm, I've seen some pretty hair-raising stuff done with Excel already... I don't think we need to increase its capabilities any further. It's an extremely powerful piece of software already. |
What can't you do in Excel? | skmurphy: The fundamental problem is that Excel forces a novice (and actually everyone) to work at a level of detail such that key elements of the plan or analysis are lost in a forest of low level code. I would focus on the novice because it will be hard to get power users to switch. Letting a user pick a range or distribution for an input instead of a specific value will help to avoid anchoring around the "one right answer."Compare two spreadsheet highlighting changes more intelligently than Excel's. For example, allow for a more intentional representation of decisions/numbers/inputs: control variable
relationships/rules: system representation
outputs/results: state variable
Track changes to indicate if inputs or rules/relationships changed, optionally ignore output changesAllow for a set of input variables (and optionally some rules) to be defined as a scenario to compare differences between scenarios. Also, let an input variable be a distribution or an interval and the scenario specify any covariances.Scenario planning and decision trees: a graphical view that can switch to a traditional spreadsheet view and vice versa.EDIT http://www.google.com/search?q="next+generation+spreadsheet" turns up some interesting ideas as well. |
How to avoid being "taken lightly" at work? | tjr: There was an episode of Happy Days in which Richie got into a little trouble, and Fonzie gave him advice on how to act tough and command respect. It didn't work for Richie. Fonzie then remembered the key component: it wasn't just acting tough; at some point in time, you had to have actually won a fight to prove it.Consider programmers that you respect; why do you respect them? Is it their in-depth knowledge? Interesting projects they've worked on? Publications they've written? Their ability to teach? I would venture to guess that most people don't just set out to be a respectable person in the abstract; they work to excel at particular things in their life. |
What can't you do in Excel? | ecommercematt: In no particular order, here are some desirable features:1) Version control.
2) Access restrictions and permissions. BONUS: Responsibilities, a la Siebel and other CRMs.
3) Simple drag and drop manipulation of data, such as concatenation.
4) Wufoo-like ease with building data entry forms.
5) Dummy data mode, so you can get help with customizing a complicated spreadsheet without revealing sensitive data.
6) Example use cases for sophisticated features, with well-written instructions, INOW a good, non-linear tutorial. |
What can't you do in Excel? | frig: Quantrix is already a better excel and look how well they're doing for themselves (or not).But seriously: take a gander at quantrix, rip off its features, slap yourself on the back for innovating, and go home.Edit: the above is perhaps a bit too snarky to be helpful.As a "power spreadsheet user" I moved on from excel to quantrix; this is something I can get away with b/c I'm not stifled with a closet full of legacy, mission-critical excel spreadsheets.Quantrix is pretty much at the sweet spot of spreadsheet functionality: it's possible to imagine a more-powerful and more-general-purpose tool, but taking it even a little further would turn it into something not really a spreadsheet any more...you'd wind up back at R.You'll find in Quantrix a mature, well-thought, and all-around "better excel". |
What can't you do in Excel? | jderick: I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the ability to import that same format. |
What can't you do in Excel? | markessien: Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | hpduong: im really interested in this, also. |
What can't you do in Excel? | colinplamondon: Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything. |
What can't you do in Excel? | nailer: I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a dictionary in a cell. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bprater: Hmm, having a private repo might be pretty nice.I wonder if the Dropbox cats have thought about doing something like this? They could continue acting as a "controller" and route data elsewhere. |
What can't you do in Excel? | nailer: A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before.findincolumn('john',a)
scrollaccross(3)
retrievedata |
What can't you do in Excel? | thorax: Best ideas I have here:* Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets.* Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull in other people's spreadsheets across the world to use as one of your cells (somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, I suppose)* Alternatively, I'd like to see Excel go three dimensional for a single sheet. At a minimum perhaps use "layers" like Photoshop would to apply transformations and adaptations that collapse into the final view.* I'd prefer this imaginary Excel also use Python or JavaScript for cell programming/calculations.* I second the versioning information idea, too-- keep a history of every manual change to every cell and allow them to be reverted. In a git-esque way, support branching of cells, etc. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | minimee: hmmm... i've been looking for something like this for a while now also.
I've also considered making one of my own. |
What can't you do in Excel? | aaw: I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:1. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a (name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it.2. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame" feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily.3. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out a tree of formulas would be an improvement. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bjclark: Webdav + some simple scripting could do it on any server. That's basically what the "iDisk" for .Mac is. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | mechanical_fish: You could hack something together using rsync, or unison. But, frankly, if neither of these things does what you want out of the box you will quickly find yourself spending more time than it's worth to save the $99 annual cost of a 50GB Dropbox account.I use unison to sync a bunch of folders between my laptop and desktop, but only on an ad hoc basis. For stuff that I want synced in the background I use Dropbox. And, frankly, I'm not sure why I'm not using Dropbox for everything. For example, I'm running Jungledisk to make backups of my current project folders to S3 in the event of a big fire in my building... but if I just put my Jungledisk stuff in a Dropbox I believe I'd be syncing it and backing it up with versioning, all automatically. I need to look into that.As for the clients that require verified encryption... is it possible to make an encrypted volume, created with something like Truecrype, and stick that in Dropbox? I've done that. Not sure how the task of automating the mounting and dismounting would go, nor of how secure this really is. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | newt0311: SVN with webdav and apache would work. |
Entering the market place | shafqat: If you're in the area, you should drive down to Geneva and meet us (NewsCred). We're always looking for smart/interesting folks... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | dw0rm: Just use any vcs. afaik there is svn behind Dropbox. |
What can't you do in Excel? | c1sc0: Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and 'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be accessed by us computational types. |
What can't you do in Excel? | pasbesoin: diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae, cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting recognition of intracell text formatting.Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then the data format and API's will be less... obtuse.Interactive, visual interface to same diff functionality.When I last looked, for Excel there was a product or two going partway in this direction; however, most seemed rather limited, e.g. export the cell contents to text and diff that.Useful for number crunchers. Also useful for all the people who end up using something like Excel as a glorified table. In the business world, there are endless use cases of people managing documents, requirements, results, etc. in Excel. Providing such a "BeyondCompare" fucntionality for this content would be very useful to a lot of them, (Caution: You might also have to teach them how to use it, including the diff concept. And that could be a very significant bump to try to get over.)Since Excel is so dominant, that class of people might not be your target market. Nonetheless, I see a good diff type utility as being a real plus.I also can agree with Zain's comment regarding versioning support.And, integrated regexp support. I wedged same in to Excel/VBA by defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (back in 1999 or 2000). Very useful. A lot of problems people deal with in spreadsheets can be greatly aided by decent pattern matching and substitution. |
What can't you do in Excel? | sebg: As someone who works in an investment bank, it would be great if this new, more powerful spreadsheet played nicely with Bloomberg, Reuters, and Factset. |
Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web? | ieatpaste: Data-based startups will be implement internally before it hits popularity. This is supported by semantic-esque elements have shown up in many APIs (such as Amazon).In my startup, we're using ARC (http://arc.semsol.org/) and microformats internally; however, we're not doing it just for the sake of new technology - data is managed better, databases can be designed well, and there is a performance gain in some cases. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | old-gregg: I run a combination of rsync+git as cron jobs. They keep all 4 computers in the house in sync with each other as well as backups on a NAS.Why even bother with rsync you may ask? Because for huge binary files (like RAW/JPEG images) I don't need a history of changes and they don't compress well, i.e. git would lead to an increased disk usage.BTW using "any VCS" advice won't work here. Git can automatically pick up rename/delete/create actions on whole directory trees without explicit commands, which is what you want if you're going for 100% automatic operation: if I delete a file on laptop "A" it will automatically disappear on laptop "B" too. Perhaps git isn't unique in this, but its better among other VCS systems I'm familiar with. It also is very compact, especially if you don't want to have a full-blown uncompressed working tree on a server.I love Dropbox, but I don't see how I could use it with my 55K/second upload speed, which is, unfortunately, quite typical for US users. (my server is in the closet). If I were them I would seriously consider selling a NAS+software kit. It's hard to imagine a middle class multi-laptop family that doesn't need one of those. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | jodrellblank: Yes it would be potentially useful/lucrative to be able to license and rebrand the Dropbox technology (server + clients) but self-hosted.[Edit: no, not the Dropbox technolgy; the Dropbox experience.] |
What can't you do in Excel? | imp: Smart conversions. If I have a graph of something in Celsius, I have to copy the data, edit it, and create a new graph just to convert it to Fahrenheit. Same with any other unit of measurement. When I was an engineer my biggest gripe with Excel was that it didn't know anything about my data. |
finding a more quantitative/researchish job? | indigoviolet: send me your resume. my email is in my profile. |
What can't you do in Excel? | jodrellblank: An interactive shell (Python, with Excel objects and helper methods ready provided). |
What can't you do in Excel? | MaysonL: Have it interface with Fluidinfo.com. [which should be going alpha sometime soon] |
What can't you do in Excel? | jmackinn: I am a huge fan of Excel. It's the program that I use most for doing work.At the entry user end, there are so many features that are simply unusable or technically way to difficult. For the power user of Excel, there is very little that can't be accomplished. It's power is basically limitless with VBA (or choose your favorite scripting language). Apart from the comment suggesting larger sizes to the sheets (larger than 1 million rows) and being online (something that would really not fly in most corporations) I can't find a problem in here that can't be accomplished with Excel and a firm knowledge of scripting for it. This may be a cop-out though as you must actually script the stuff yourself. This, however; is why I love this program so much.So as for building a more powerful spreadsheet program for the power user market, it's going to be very hard for anyone to produce something that does more because it's already basically limitless.For the novice user though, the program is convoluted, confusing and extremely limited. The novice user also represents a much bigger market. I have had several jobs simply because people couldn't do things in Excel that I assumed a monkey could do. Companies love Excel even though 99% of employees at them have no idea how to do basic things with it (summing columns for example). Giving some of the 99% of employees a program that they can do basic to intermediate things without having the limitless back end scripting power would put me out of many of my jobs.Excel at the start is like a country kid visiting the big city for the first time. There is just way to much power in it and the map for getting around is far too confusing, but once you've been living there for a while everything about it becomes a breeze. Making that adjustment easier would be a huge benefit.On a side note I enjoy using Google Spreadsheets but one of my top wishes is that Google, or someone, would implement either a Google scripting language or a allow for other scripting languages (Ruby, Python, VBA) to be used. |
What can't you do in Excel? | niels_olson: Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559 |
Online C++ Resources? | IsaacSchlueter: Accelerated C++ is here: http://www.amazon.com/Accelerated-Practical-Programming-Exam...And, of course, there's the STL, but it's more a reference than a how-to: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/ |
What can't you do in Excel? | lisper: http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | babul: Slightly off topic here, but as many people are mentioning rsynch, I was wondering if it is possible to get rsynch working on a cellphone/smartphone.I was intrigued by the idea of making a universal backup/synch client based on rsynch. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | RobGR: It seems to me that the file-sharing and version tracking are two different things that should have two different problems.If you want this but on your own servers, maybe check out ringlight: http://ringlight.us/ |
What can't you do in Excel? | brent: I do not use Excel regularly and I thus am certainly not a power user. However, I would think scripting for plots would be useful (like I do in matlab or matplotlib) for repetitive, highly configured, high quality plots with the ability to easily export them as ps or pdf. This may very well be possible now (and I'm just ignorant), but that would be one thing that would be handy that I have not seen. |
Learning resources for MS SQL Server? | sker: I always have this opened in a tab:http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php/Category:Microsoft_SQL...It's not exactly a beginner's tutorial but I like it because it covers a lot of use cases. Also, it's short and to the point.I hope you find it useful. |
What can't you do in Excel? | Spyckie: 1.) automatic smart chart creation - the spreadsheet guesses the kind of data I'm inputting and builds a chart on the fly.2.) UI that values datasets over data points, or some sort of functionality that defines a dataset. Since most tasks deal with sets as a whole (and not individual points) this would result in a much cleaner, quicker interface. Also, you could start treating a dataset like a black box instead of a TON of cells with meaningless value, and thereby gain access to a lot of shortcuts not possible currently. This should allow easy data entry, dataset searching, and will keep all your scripting in your view. Best of all, there's no need to manipulate cells at all with a dataset approach. |
Online C++ Resources? | bayareaguy: Here are some references I review whenever I need to work with C++.* The GNU C++ Library Documentation - http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/spine.html* Scott Meyers TR1 Information - http://www.aristeia.com/EC3E/TR1_info.html* Association of C & C++ users - http://accu.org* C++ Library Reference http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/* Guru of the Week archive - http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/index.htmThese are a little older:* Lysator (Linköping, Sweden) - http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/index.html* Brad Appleton's C++ Links - http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/links/cplusplus-links.ht... |
Where do you find good testers? | cperciva: I mentioned that I was working on secure online backups on my blog back in 2006, and by the time I was ready for beta testers I had a long list of people who had emailed me to express interest. Once I had all of those people testing tarsnap and still wanted more testers, I posted again to my blog and submitted that post here and to reddit, which brought me many more testers. Recently it seems that every time I've posted to my (personal) blog there has been a spike in signups; presumably people come to my blog, see my earlier posts about tarsnap, and then get interested.I don't know how useful my experience is to you, since the sort of experienced *nix users who appreciate tarsnap are generally far more cliquey than "news junkies" -- but you asked for my experience, so here it is. :-) |
Musicians? | nickfox: I've been playing guitar and singing for a good number of years. I'm working on my second music video. It's the song Patience by Guns n' Roses. My first music video was Across the Universe by the Beatles. I don't have very good "stage presence" in my first video but the one I'm working on now will be much better. Here's my first video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zro5VpUf0&feature=chann... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | mileszs: For an rsync-like solution that also handles the tar-ing and (GnuPG) encryption of whatever directory you want to backup, take a look at duplicity (if you're on some Linux flavor). http://duplicity.nongnu.org/It is a command-line solution, and simple to throw in cron. In addition, you can use it to back things up to S3 directly. It's great. |
What can't you do in Excel? | JeffL: I would like to do conditional formatting on one column based on the contents of another column. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | vaksel: add adsense or have a mission once a month to raise funds in exchange for points |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | astrec: Perhaps something around event or product based missions e.g Partner with X Corp, who to celebrate the release of product Y run a that requires the novel use of Y etc. Otherwise, what vaksel said... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | drinian: BackupPC http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ is probably what you're looking for, although I can't tell you about the encryption part. I am just starting to look into serious backup solutions myself. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bayareaguy: Here's an article that reviews two possibly relevent open source tools - http://www.linux.com/feature/154149Unison File Synchronizer: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unisonDirSync Pro: http://directorysync.sourceforge.net/ |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | tapinko: I was thinking of something with 'WOOT' ? Maybe doing something where people win prizes daily (for solving missions)-P |
What can't you do in Excel? | crsmith: Freeze multiple, unconnected columns and rows.That way I could view the descriptions at the top and the sums at the bottom while I'm scrolling through any point in a spreadsheet. |
What can't you do in Excel? | egl: You can't tell whether you got the right answer.My rule of thumb is that any interesting spreadsheet has a mistake. Anyone who uses a spreadsheet and doesn't independently know the answer "close enough" is living in a fool's paradise. |
What can't you do in Excel? | neilk: 1. Really, really great looking graphs. Excel fails so hard at this it's unbelievable.2. Easy navigation. The giant spreadsheet model is a very simple metaphor but sometimes I'd like a way to jump to different parts of it more easily.3. Not be a spreadsheet. The one-big-sheet model might be better represented as a bunch of smaller tables floating in space with formulas interconnecting them. The letter/number convention has been around since the very first spreadsheet, surely we can do better.4. Understand the internet. RSS, live stock quotes, etc. The address of a cell ought to be internet-compatible somehow, e.g. http://myspreadsheets.com/daily_report/C2 or http://myspreadsheet.com/daily_report/mynamedtable?x=Jan2007.... Google Docs does something like this, I think.5. Allow scripting in a language that doesn't completely suck. Javascript or python would be good choices. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | Jebdm: If it has a significant community, have meetups with an entry fee with prizes, etc. Get sponsored prizes. Make a Facebook app (increased ad revenue). Honestly, I don't see it being incredibly profitable, but it is a neat idea. |
Online C++ Resources? | psyklic: If you want training, I recommend books (which teach you very efficiently).If you want the latest tips, tricks, and ways of thinking, then I recommend blogs (which are highly inefficient). |
What can't you do in Excel? | mwexler: One interesting model of where spreadseets may go is Resolver, at http://code.google.com/p/resolver/ or http://www.resolversystems.com/. Most of the issues complained about here can be solved through the Python back end. |
Where do you find good testers? | thomatas: You could setup a project on Amazon Mechanical Turk or use some service that offers a management layer on top of it like UserTesting.com. |
What can't you do in Excel? | critic: They must be very good, if they are expected to come up with something within a few months that will be able to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Open Office.I can't wait to see it. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | jmackinn: Why don't you have a mission about how Daily Mission can make money? |
What can't you do in Excel? | ken: Separation of data, formulas, and graphs (a la MVC). It shouldn't be a mystery to me whether a number is data I've entered, or a result of a computation.It should also have a real solver, so I don't have to work out formulas on paper first. If I can type in some equations (legibly) and it's possible to derive the data I want from the data and formulas I've given, then just do it.(I understand Lotus Improv got this right. In fact, from what I've read about it, Lotus Improv got many things right. A modern clone of Improv would be cool.)Also, it should know units. If my search engine can do unit conversions on the fly, my spreadsheet ought to be able to.Better graphing. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but every time I try to make a graph in a spreadsheet, I end up with something that doesn't look at all like I wanted.N.B., I've basically given up on spreadsheets. For lists, I use an outliner. For simple math, I use a HLL like Ruby or Lisp or Octave. I suspect if there was an OmniOutliner for Windows, Excel would die overnight. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | noodle: sponsored missions.if people complete missions to rack up points to become top users, offer an advertising program that companies can tie higher point missions into their product somehow. |
Online C++ Resources? | scott_s: http://www.boost.orgThe next time you find yourself saying "I wish C++ let me do X" or "I wish the STL had a library for Y" take a moment to search through Boost. You might find something that fits your needs.I've read a lot of hate for Boost. I personally make a point to use it everytime it provides functionality I need. The libraries often have a learning curve - sometimes a significant one. But they're also usually powerful. |
What can't you do in Excel? | kirubakaran: Emacs key bindings please. |
SlinkSet or Pligg? | medianama: Having tried Pligg for a while, I can tell you SPAM is a huge problem. Couple of weeks after the site went live, I started getting all these registrations from bots that I had to spend 30 minutes daily to clean that up... ultimately, I had to disable new user registrations, which kills the whole thing..not sure about SlinkSet though... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | edb: I always thought that dropbox would be much better if I could tie it together with my S3 account and just have all the data saved there, to an unlimited amount paid by me. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | chris11: You could sell numbered prizes to the winners, like t-shirts and other marked swag announcing how great the winner did.You might link the cost to the buyers position in the winner's list. I know one t-shirt company sells limited edition t shirts and charges a dollar per edition number (e.g. $20 for #20, $1 for #1). |
What can't you do in Excel? | gcanyon: As others have written, some of the things I've longed for in Excel are found in Numbers -- they're also available in Ragtime: the ability to place multiple spreadsheets independently in a single document and work on full ranges within them. Ragtime adds rotation of spreadsheet objects.I prefer lightweight databases to spreadsheets, so my suggestions would be similar to what FileMaker says: http://www.filemaker.com/articles/database/new_database.htmlIn short: make it easy to present a set of information through different views, make it easy to share between users, make it easy to create and maintain complex data structures and validation. Presenting information from the spreadsheet through the web, with or without edit capability, would be good. |
Musicians? | nose: I am re-learning the piano. |
What can't you do in Excel? | iigs: Disclaimer: not particularly a power user. Problem also probably more of a UI/UX issue than a technical issue.From time to time when I'm working in excel I'll find I've derived an answer from a couple adjacent input cells and several intermediate calculation step cells below. As a contrived example, lets say I have pennies per number of hours and I want to convert to dollars per year. I'll start with hours per year (365.25*24) and divide that by the input "number of hours". Then I'll divide the input "number of pennies" by 100 to get dollars. Then I'll multiply the two together to get my output.Without fail after working through a problem like this I will want to make a 2-D grid with an input variable on each axis and have the results filled into the grid. Unfortunately because I just did it using a bunch of intermediate cells I can't copy and paste, drag and fill, or any of the other intuitive mechanisms. To date the only solution I've found to this problem is to re-do all of my work in VBA as a single function and use =myFn(colval,rowval) in each cell.There are a couple ways this could play out. One of which would be to call subordinate sheets (or chunks of sheets) as functions. This is how I've envisioned it in my head. It would be a terrible pain to make that work, and I'd be afraid it would confuse people who wouldn't understand which cells worked normally and which cells were function components.Another solution would be to select an output cell and have it refactor it to a function that could be called. This is probably a lot easier to do, but might not be as maintainable by the kinds of people that don't understand VBA -- they could keep the "source code" cells around and recompile when changes are made, but all of the standard code generator / manual edit problems apply. |
Learning resources for MS SQL Server? | gaius: There is loads of great content on MSDN, tutorials, references, magazine articles, etc. |
Anyone want to work through SICP together? | daniel-cussen: I got through it in a sense. I attempted every problem of the first of the five sections, and solved most of them. Then I worked with a tutor who looked through the rest of it and decided to work on something closer to the state of the art. I wouldn't say what I learned was better than SICP, but it was interesting. |
What can't you do in Excel? | nrao123: I have not read all the comments since there are too many of them. Here is my wish list(I am an ex- Mgmt consultant) without knowing if its already covered in the comments:
1) Creating a new tab/sheet and choosing if the tab should be a document or spreadsheet type so that I can run my numbers once and reference my table in the document and not worry about cutting and pasting. Really helps reduce word document and report writing. This is a fundamential mind set shift as an excel spreadsheet hardly goes on its own. Its always accompanied by a document and syncing the numbers between the report/tables and the excel is a massive PITA.
2) Importing some functionality of Access (running unique/group by queries, inner join/outer join etc...) in Excel. Helps me run complex data queries while maintaining data integrity.
3) A wiki like online spreadsheet. (dont think Google Docs does this. For e.g. if we are running a valuation for a company and each team mate has different assumptions for each variables, this can help team mates input thier assumptions and track it and see the overall impact on the numbers. Instead of the current model of emailing spreadsheets back and forth or erasing new data over old ones (e.g. like Google Spreadsheets). Btw- I strongly believe just implementing this last point alone and narrowly defining yourself as a model builder (with wiki like enterprise capabilites) would generate strong traction in I-Banks, Buy side firms, sell side research firms, market research companies, mgmt consulting firms, insurance companies etc...Would love to try out a beta version if available. my email is raonikhilesh "@" gmail |
What can't you do in Excel? | PoweredByWill: OLE is a joke, if this is a client-side application add embeddable spreadsheet widgets.Pivot-tables would be nice as a core function to model data (see quantrix.com)Make 'light databases' part of the architecture and not counter-design.
something like, spreadsheets meets csv with a cli query component or similar. |
finding a more quantitative/researchish job? | nailer: Apply for a job at a hedge fund. Our best and brightest are all quants. |
Where do you find good testers? | trapper: I've always thought an exclusive, invite only beta testing site where the company throws up 500$ or so, and everyone who tests and nitpicks gets a share would be awesome. |
What can't you do in Excel? | jblondon: 1. It should be possible to turn a sheet into a function. So I can then define my own 'inputs' and 'outputs' for that sheet, and 'call' it with whatever parameters I like from another sheet. Sure it can be done in code, but for building large, maintainable models that's not practical.2. 'Hard' and 'Soft' numbers (i.e., numbers I manually enter vs. numbers that are the result of a formulae) should be automatically coloured accordingly if I want them to be. Manually plugging in a number on top of a formula should not necessarily over-write the formula. It's quite common I want to preserve the logic but 'hack in' a variable. Instead, it's either or (and I have to copy/paste the formula into a comment for the cell, which is a pain and clumsy as hell).3. Track changes.4. Non-euclidean topology ... by which I mean, making it possible to vary the number of colums / rows and column / row sizes within a single sheet. |
What can't you do in Excel? | vincentvwyl: Instead of the programming angle, I would like a user-interface that works for right-brained people and doesn't drive you bonkers after spending more than a few hours on it. That would be a blue ocean in the world of spreadsheets. |
Anyone want to work through SICP together? | sgaur: Please add me too |
Is there a site dedicated to startup news and job postings? | david927: For start-up jobs there's startuply.comFor start-up tech news and information, there are a million sites for every taste and size. |
What can't you do in Excel? | chris_l: For conventional programming I've been working on laying the logic out as a graph automatically. Instead of cryptic formulas in the cells, you would have an easy to understand graph that shows how information is related and computed. In addition the intermediate results for selected input values could be shown next to the nodes and links, to allow inspection of the computation.This could be adapted for the spreadsheet concept. Actually, it might be more appropriate there. |
What can't you do in Excel? | gsiener: FWIW, I would often query a database and make completely de-normalized datasets that I'd paste into Excel. Then I would pivot the crap out of them and figure out how I wanted to slice the data... |
What can't you do in Excel? | khafra: The ability to do regex matches to cells, not just full exact text with a case sensitive/insensitive option. |
What can't you do in Excel? | Vitriol: Please do pivot tables |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | bemmu: If you don't mind being a bit seedy, sign up to Offerpal Media / Super Rewards and give users extra points from completing their offers. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | drhowarddrfine: No one wants to install yet another unused technology (Silverlight) for an unknown new product. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | pclark: wow, really impressive application (I made an account)I couldn't get "website" resources to work? when I load them it just fails, odd!the app wasn't full screen for me by the way, merely full window :)How did you find Silverlight to develop in? are you on twitter? you should be :) |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | Encosia: It's crashing both IE8 and FF3 when I attempt to type the first character in the email address field on the login page.Silverlight version 2.0.31005.0. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | jawngee: Well to start, rethink the EC2 web serving, you're spending more money than you need to. Consider linode or slicehost as bandwidth is way cheaper than amazon.Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thrown up roadblocks to two platforms that can no longer be considered marginal (OS X and Linux) for what is an arbitrary technology choice. At least with Flex you'll hit 98% of it and you can't sell me that silverlight has any advantage over Flex that is worth that.I'd love to give you more feedback because I'm very interested in online collaboration, but I can't because I'm on Linux and won't install SilverLight on my mac. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | axod: * It's way too shiny. Like by a factor of a billion.
* I can't find somewhere to just click "Free - go - try it"
* And I have to install silverlight??? You've just reduced your potential market to a very small niche. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | tomh-: It looks very cool, I just created an account. Not sure if its usefull for me, but it is at least interesting to see a nice silverlight app. Did you build it with Blend or just Visual Studio? Personally I would pick Flex due the market share it got. But silverlight is much more enjoyable to develop with. Mainly because the adobe builder is not as good as Visual Studio and Blend. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | ttrashh: Very impressive. I tried a word doc and a web page...nice UI.I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to an image? |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | ashleyw: • Silverlight could be an issue, the adoption rate isn't that great so the majority of visitors would have to install a plugin to be able to do anything — people get turned away from sites because of a slow loading page, so being prompted to install a plugin may be enough for them to bounce back to where they came from. Plus of course a lot of corporate environments have a ban on installing new software, and a lot of mobile devices (iPhones, etc.) don't even have Flash, so Silverlight is a long way off...• Black — arrggg! Personally I hate websites which have a colour palette ranging from #ccc to #000! They even disorientate me a bit…I think! It may just be me, but somehow I doubt the rest of the world loves such a dull colour.However it's a very impressive app, you can tell you [guys (?)] have put a lot of work into it, and I wish you the best of luck — if I needed such a product I'd be MORE than willing to pay for Colaab! :) |
What can't you do in Excel? | abc3: I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._GoogleThe thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns, specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings, instead of through websites like Gurufocus.For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman:http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+KlarmanYou can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC Info:http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wtClearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely available SEC filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...) into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than I'd like. |
What can't you do in Excel? | timae: I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get GoogleChartsAPI url".That'd be sweet. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | siong1987: Ok. I spent 10 minutes to download SilverLight and restarted my browser just to view the video. Why don't you just use the flash video player?Then, when I proceeded to the sign up page, I were "amazed" that you created the price plan with SilverLight too. And, it took time to load again just to view the price and to login.When I stumbled upon the sign up form, there were too much information that I have to give. This doesn't really favor any users who want to try the service (first name, last name, email, username, etc in SilveerLight). And, I have to wait for a confirmation email to get started?!? Luckily, the confirmation email reached faster than I thought and I gave my actual email. I wish that you won't spam my mail box.And, finally, I cousd get started with the service. I stared at it for 2 minutes and had no clue how to use it. Then, I clicked the close button. I will try the service again if someone in HN give a good review about it.I know that it is partially my fault because I didn't watch the 8mins long intro video and the popup tooltips in the working platform.http://riastats.com/ < You can see that there is only ~15% of penetration of silverlight on internet. Hopefully microsoft will put in more marketing budget in Silverlight despite the "failure" of Vista.Sorry if I am too harsh on my language and I am not trying to discourage you at all. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | dan_sim: This is a general point of view but I don't see the perks in using any RIA technologies (Flash or Silverlight) when javascript librairies are available everywhere (and I'm talking about jquery). What can you do with silverlight that can't be done with jquery?I didn't try the app (because of silverlight) but I really like the design. Is black the new blue? |
What to do with a spare computer? | speek: Asterisk.Samba share.Pluto home (really nifty home automation + media server). |
What to do with a spare computer? | quellhorst: Give it to someone who has an even older computer. |
What to do with a spare computer? | vaksel: gut it for parts, add the RAM and HD to your current computer.Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc. |
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