Nov 27, 2023
My wife has to work with a lot of Excel matrices, and for each project they are working on, they have to apply the same transforms, formulas and operations to dozens of different input data. It's a very destructive workflow. If a mistake is done during the process, she has to redo multiple steps. It also prevents of trying and experimenting with different ways of analyzing the data, since it's quite time consuming.
It's quite the same case of working on a painting in Photoshop with or without layers and layer filters. The former approach is very destructive and rigid, while the latter is safer, prevents disasters, and allows quick changes and experimentation.
Another example would be working in Houdini with nodes vs editing the mesh directly. I guess you get the point.
So for many years I tried helping her with this issue. The fact is that Excel is too familiar and convenient (and let's face it, an amazing piece of software) that is hard to find an alternative. I tried a few things:
The latest thing I made so far is a second stack-based prototype in Javascript. It looks like this:
