Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell

Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.

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.

Its a paid add-on but @Risk gives the functionality you're looking for

When I did Process Improvement we used MiniTab for this.

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.

What would this look like? Whenever I need something like that, I just stick each parameter in its own cell and use functions from there.

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.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

it's the Baghavad Gita, which Oppenheimer quoted. there's a wikipedia link...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#/media/File:Trin...

When I read this post earlier, I immediately thought, "don't cross the streams."

I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly used a tool up until 2020 that was originally created in Excel 97.

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.

Were you able to process truly large datasets? I worked at a very excel company once but we kept running into row limit issues when scaling workloads and eventually migrated almost everything away from it. What industry were you in at the time?

> 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.

Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.

But treesheets isn’t used by millions of office workers across the globe. I doubt treesheets is know by 2% of the HN audience. So it just doesn’t make the news.

Or was the point you knew an obscure fact about an obscure application?

And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?

Are you familiar with LibreOffice? Are there any advantages that OnlyOffice has over other open source spreadsheets?

I'm sure someone has already coined a law something like this:

The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.

I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.

Excel does not need to be as opinionated or portable as a programming language. This might actually be a lesser of two evils considering what type of user behavior it encourages. (I've heard a similar ethos behind certain design decisions of Go)

Microsoft is actively harming the laypersons comprehension of their data with 'features' such as this.

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.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrieve

You could call a named range or ctrl+shift+enter to run an array command. You couldn't put a defined array in a single cell, it would read at text.

These arrays are IN A SINGLE CELL

I have, at the risk of being a meme, put spreadsheets in cells via OLE. It was glorious.

They already had that with 3D formulas. (Not even kidding... you can sum the same range across multiple spreadsheet tabs)

Is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider... better? We could swap the URLs.

Edit: I swapped the URLs.

You already had sheets in the workbook for depth

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s good for the economy.

And something that isn't AI or an advertising opportunity…

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.