Spreadsheets are dreams (2015)
&gt; Every cell can contain text, data or formulae; every cell, row and column may be endlessly multiplied and referenced. These two qualities make spreadsheets an indeterminate material matrix — the textured all-over-ness of a Pollock painting. Or the empty space of a desert landscape in whose expansive lines could be written every story.<p>&gt; Spreadsheets can render scenarios with total variability, but the complexity needed to turn every product, object, idea or structure in a spreadsheet into a twiddlable dial or live display often suffocates the insight in a sandstorm of choking numbers. …<p>There seem to be quite a few recent tools which try to solve this problem by replacing the grid paradigm with something a bit more structured. The main ones I’m aware of are <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inflex.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inflex.io&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trymito.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trymito.io&#x2F;</a>, but there are many more, and I even had a go at making one myself. I’m not optimistic about their chances in general, though. Traditional spreadsheet UIs are immensely flexible, and great for small calculations and anything involving tables or lists. They also happen to be utterly awful at anything even remotely large-scale, but by the time people figure that out, it’s usually too late to switch as the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in.<p>On the other hand, what are the alternatives? Programming languages require a fairly significant expenditure of effort to learn, and don’t give nearly the amount of interactivity that spreadsheets do. Even environments like Jupyter notebooks, or the MATLAB IDE, don’t come close. Besides, in the hands of the unskilled — and even the skilled, really — programs for data analysis can become nearly as messy as spreadsheets, especially with popular languages like Python and MATLAB.<p>For these reasons, though I utterly despise spreadsheets, I am also beginning to despair of ever successfully replacing them with something better: spreadsheets are just too convenient, so why would anyone use anything else? Excel is always going to be more convenient in the moment than any more principled tool, precisely because it is infinitely flexible and has no restrictions. People don’t like friction in their UX when they just want to do a few calculations. There is an avenue to wide usage for tools like Mito (linked above), which give programmers a more spreadsheet-like interface, and so integrate nicely into workflows which already exist. But this approach is in itself limiting; I want a tool I can open and use <i>right now</i>, not one where I have to make a whole new Python environment and notebook and so on just to do a simple calculation. Alas, I see no way to get wide adoption, or perhaps even adoption by myself, for any ‘better spreadsheet’ implementation.