hckrnws
Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
by luispa
by luispa
I'm sure that these new features will find a lot of use amongst many people. And seeing these Excel innovations is heartening.
I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near "complicated". It's still valuable for what I use for.
Same for marketing students and, although it's a lower academic level, they still need Excel for prospect lists.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
Wonder if it works with all the functions - most of which would assume one value
I wouldn't consider myself a "pro" Excel user. I think my comprehension would be on the higher end of "basic", or maybe the lowest end of "intermediate".
That said, in all the years I've used spreadsheets, I guess I've never really thought I needed more than one value in a cell. I never really seriously considered putting JSON or something in there, and have been ok with just using more cells instead (especially since Office 2019 when they added dynamic arrays that allowed spillover).
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-kb5002914...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#/media/File:Trin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
I guess I am dating myself!
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.
This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.
Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.
Also the people who would use R and who would use excel are completely different. They use both for the same thing but a user of one would rarely use the other
Or was the point you knew an obscure fact about an obscure application?
This is a strange world we live in.
Backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
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This looks like a very sane implementation, addresses some issues with traditional arrays (while extending them nicely) and implements those much-needed formulas.
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?
Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.
Sigh.
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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...
Edit: I swapped the URLs.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Though they have been slowly adding useful new features to Excel (auto- spill is one I occasionally find to be both a time saver and a mistake reducer) for a few years now, after a long time seemingly doing very little with it. While I'm all for things having a "done" state and after that not doing much with them so as to not break a good thing, there is plenty of room for little improvements like new functions (admittedly many of them likely a bit niche) in Excel, just as long as they don't break what already works at the same time.
The real question is if Google Sheets will get these features.
That may sound reductive and dismissive, but I think that's actually pretty cool and likely to make some things a lot easier.
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.
If you want people to be able to use Excel or service a mechanical typewriter, you need to spend extra effort to teach them.
I would love an easier way to communicate to tech/math-illiterate CEOs that worst case, average case, and best case are different things, but must all be planned for.
I honestly was not a fan of that program and would have loved to be able to use Excel, but there are so many statistical things you just can't do in it.
Matrices are Tensors but with the matrix product operator instead of the tensor product operator.
Pandas supports MultiIndex DataFrames but the pandas docs recommend xarray for 3D and N-Dimensional data.
xarray supports N-Dimensional data as for example NetCDF but not tensor arithmetic.
xarray_jax: https://github.com/google-deepmind/xarray_jax :
> This library solves that problem. It registers xarray data structures as custom JAX PyTrees. This allows JAX to seamlessly flatten xarray objects into their raw arrays for accelerated computation and then unflatten the results back into fully labeled xarray objects, preserving critical metadata like dimension names and coordinates.
flatten and unflatten with datatypes is necessary for unrolling loops for performance.
Which is the correct logic for probabilistic logic, for expressions with frequentist or symbolic distributions as values? Are quantum logic and quantum statistical mechanics the appropriate or useful tools for all probabilistic logic?
dist_a1 <operator> dist_a2
uncertainties does mean±dev in Python with numpy types.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411280 :
> W3C CSVW supports per-column schema. ( with URIs for datatypes )
> Serialize a dict containing a value with uncertainties and/or Pint (or astropy.units) and complex values to JSON, then read it from JSON back to the same types. Handle datetimes, complex values, and categoricals
IEEE-754 specifies NaN (null), ±0, three infinities (positive, negative, and unsigned), but IEEE-754 does not specify a representation for categoricals, datetimes (like ISO8601), or complex numbers.
XSD (XML Schema Datatypes), which RDFS vocabularies often use to specify the rdfs:range of an rdfs:Property, does not specify how to specify abstract complex numbers; but OpenMath RDF, and QUDT (Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and Types) and OM Ontology all have a way to save complex numbers to disk, too.
(While now almost everybody uses the names "tensor product" and "contracted tensor product", historically these names are wrong. Better names, which do not misuse the word "tensor", would have been "Zehfuss product" and "Cayley product", after the names of the mathematicians who have introduced them.)
The word "tensor" has become increasingly corrupted over the years. Originally, it had a meaning that matched its etymology, i.e. "tensor" meant "symmetric matrix", because a matrix could be decomposed through the polar decomposition into a tensor and a versor (i.e. a symmetric matrix and a rotation matrix).
Then what is now called tensor theory was created by Ricci, but without ever using the word "tensor". The meaning of the word "tensor" was changed by Einstein in his theory of the general relativity, where for unknown reasons he chose this word to refer to arrays with an arbitrary number of dimensions that satisfy a certain kind of transformation relationships when the systems of coordinates is changed.
After WWII, due to the huge popularity of Einstein, this weird usage of the word has become widespread.
Then for many decades tensors were just a subset of arrays, those that are changed in a certain specific way when the system of coordinates is changed.
Eventually, there was the second corruption of the word "tensor" which is completely unjustified, when "tensor" has become just a synonym for "array".
Vectors are 1-dimensional arrays (though originally, like tensors, vectors were only a subset of 1-dimensional arrays), matrices are 2-dimensional arrays and nowadays "tensors" means just "arrays", i.e. of an arbitrary dimension.
The tensor product and the contracted tensor product are defined for arrays of arbitrary dimensions. For 2-dimensional arrays the contracted tensor product is a.k.a. matrix product, and for 1-dimensional arrays it is a.k.a. scalar product.
by having nukes we prevent world war 3, see british operation unthinkable
at least you never have to worry about who pays
MATLAB was the runner up for our tools but the good part about Excel was that every PC had it whereas MATLAB wasn't and also needed network access for the license (or else your program/department had to buy a node license). Later, many people switched to python since not everyone loves MATLAB and it's more of a real software language (and it's free) than what's effectively a very expensive calculator.
Blocking VBA (for security reasons) did wonders for process maturity because it forced funded implementation of programs. Now we have vibeslop we're going the other way.
Especially since it uses your cookies by default.
Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.
What I like about OnlyOffice over LibreOffice is the UI. I like how it’s one program that can open all the documents rather than a collection of different programs as well. It feels clean, simple, and modern.
What was that syntax like?
Excel allows and embraces whatever mess you want to make.
Reasoning about the basic shape of data with real estate managers using the Btrieve[0] database on DOS (and then XP) in years gone by was noticeably more straight forward than wrangling the monolithic excel monstrosities encountered today.
A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine. But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?
Is it that I complained in the way I stated something? Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time), I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here.
> But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?
Of course it's fine. It's just a question of how. There were two problems with your comment: (1) it was snarky, which we're trying to avoid and which HN's guidelines ask you not do do; and (2) you didn't provide much information, so it came across as shallow. The combination of snarky and shallow is bad for the conversation we're hoping for.
It sounds like you have experience in this domain. If so, you could write an interesting comment about your experience (e.g. with spreadsheets, VBA, how they control businesses) and how the current release will break things. If you did that by adding details from your personal experience (anecdotes are king!) and avoiding snark, that would be more than fine.
Such comments, of course, take time to write. It's taken me 37 minutes and counting to write this one. (Edit: 45 minutes.) If you don't want to or don't have time, that's ok—just please refrain from snarky/shallow/indignant one-liners.
> A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine
It's common (and understandable) that when people see comment A going unmoderated while their own comment B is scolded by a mod, they feel singled out for unfair treatment. I've described this in the past as "it always feels like the mods are against you" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
But there's a dirt-simple explanation: we don't see everything. Not even close! There's far too much for us to see even 10% of what gets posted here. When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest reason is that we didn't see it. You can always help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
> Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time)
What gets my attention are comments breaking the site guidelines. It's nothing personal! I didn't remember replying to you before, though once you mentioned it, I looked it up.
It goes against every bone in my Aquarian body to regard myself as a policeman, but the analogy somewhat holds in this case. Say you get pulled over for speeding. It's easy to feel you're being singled out: what about the cars that were speeding past you? do they just get a pass? But it's not personal. Policeperson is just sitting there doing their (no doubt rather boring) highway duty.
> I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here
I gather that you perceive HN's guidelines as specifically American? I see them differently. They are an attempt at figuring out how to manage a large internet forum across national differences—and other differences—without degenerating into mutual clubbing (the caveman kind, not the dancing kind).
None of the HN moderators is American. The site was created by an American, but he was born in England and has been ensconced there for quite a while now. It's all more complex than one's assumptions imagine, and when you fire those at people, you can sting them. Even at internet distances.
I mentioned America, because I'm from Australia, and our two cultures, as often as we interact, do have moments where we fizzle and pop against each other. Calling someone sir or ma'am is a service in America. In Australia, it is liable to piss off the person you're talking to. What one sees as polite, often isn't for the other.
I don't see any snark in what I've said. I see a little frustration, but I don't see any attack on anyone. Which makes it hard to judge, why one thing is acceptable, and another isn't, when they hold the same gravitas and attitude. Again, a "What did I do, exactly?" not a "why are they picking on me".
Is it that snark and sarcasm are synonyms over there? They aren't here. Probably because Australia is a very sarcastic place (e.g. "Yeah, nah").
It it that I didn't add an extra frame, to de-escalate, before saying this was going to cause problems? That is something I often see foreigners feeling the need to do, that just doesn't happen here. If something is crap, we call it crap. Especially if we built it ourselves, and in business communications and court readings as often as face to face.
I already do change my tone on HN, from what works in the home country. Seems I need to change it further.
I didn't add an anecdote for this one, simply because it is well-trodden ground. That businesses run out of Excel, and run into various problems with compatibility, has more blogposts than the site could probably host. It isn't an interesting thing.
The only interesting bit, is that this is going to ruin the days of a few people, and they already know why. My comment was just an invitation to commiserate. Adding more, would direct the conversation more towards those who would criticise and judge the process, without acknowledging the business process is probably not changeable. I don't want to start flames here. I do want to follow the guidelines, because I do agree with them. And if I didn't, I wouldn't be here.
It turns out that, with practice, you can read comments along one axis and not another. And boy do we practice.
The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.
OK, maybe with plug-ins, but probably not natively.
Probably not.
Maybe.
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