This is cool, but I think it might be missing what the big problems with spreadsheets are.
I was complaining just today because I pasted some records into Excel and it decided to treat 933349234275230104 as a number (it's a hash), convert it to scientific notation (which I NEVER want), and lose precision. Yet there is no way to globally disable scientific notation. Plus it's kind of insane that "formatting" changes data in the first place.
I frequently paste timestamps into Sheets or Excel and it just ruins everything. If split-to-text puts the date part in one column and the time part in another, I can't put them back together with a simple string concatenation, because again "formatting" turned my date text into Excel's weird internal number. This is legacy behavior that Excel has to keep for backward compatibility, but I don't want it, and I wish I could turn it off.
Sometimes I'll try to scatter-plot 5 series against a timestamp, and Excel will decide all 6 columns are series, even though a scatter plot with no X-axis makes zero sense. Even when it does work, Excel seems stubbornly uninterested in understanding how dates/times work, and I can't do simple things like tell it to have an X-axis tick every day/week/month.
If you are building a spreadsheet in 2023, the #1 goal should be leaving behind all the baggage, even if it has to be behind a toggle. Listen to what people find frustrating about Excel (tip: it's gonna be dates) and fix that.
If you can do that, then yeah, Python! Woo! Neat! But that's not going to be the main draw, because it's not a solution to the main problems that spreadsheets have.
I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but if you want unaltered text content in an Excel cell, prefix it with a single quote ('). This “escapes” the value so that it isn’t interpreted as any other data type.
In that case, you could prepare a sheet in advance by setting the format of all cells to text. Shortcut sequence Ctrl+A Ctrl+1 Tab T T Return. You can record this as a macro (Developer tab) or save the result as a template.
Yes, the default format behavior can be annoying, but if it's a frequent problem there are ways to make one's life easier.
While we didn't set out to solve those problems in Neptyne, using actual data types in a spreadsheet does solve this sort of problems. Of course we have to be a little compatible, so our dates do come with the 1900 is a leap year bug that pre-dates excel. But they also have a .to_datetime() if you want to be more sophisticated. We have great plots out of the box, but if we want to go deeper, you can use whatever plotly or pydeck construct gets you exactly what you want.
This can be resolved by changing the cells' format from General to Text. This makes the cells display the text exactly as entered. Select the relevant cells -> right click on them -> Format Cells... -> Text -> Ok
I was complaining just today because I pasted some records into Excel and it decided to treat 933349234275230104 as a number (it's a hash), convert it to scientific notation (which I NEVER want), and lose precision. Yet there is no way to globally disable scientific notation. Plus it's kind of insane that "formatting" changes data in the first place.
I frequently paste timestamps into Sheets or Excel and it just ruins everything. If split-to-text puts the date part in one column and the time part in another, I can't put them back together with a simple string concatenation, because again "formatting" turned my date text into Excel's weird internal number. This is legacy behavior that Excel has to keep for backward compatibility, but I don't want it, and I wish I could turn it off.
Sometimes I'll try to scatter-plot 5 series against a timestamp, and Excel will decide all 6 columns are series, even though a scatter plot with no X-axis makes zero sense. Even when it does work, Excel seems stubbornly uninterested in understanding how dates/times work, and I can't do simple things like tell it to have an X-axis tick every day/week/month.
If you are building a spreadsheet in 2023, the #1 goal should be leaving behind all the baggage, even if it has to be behind a toggle. Listen to what people find frustrating about Excel (tip: it's gonna be dates) and fix that.
If you can do that, then yeah, Python! Woo! Neat! But that's not going to be the main draw, because it's not a solution to the main problems that spreadsheets have.