Excel as a Frontend
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
alexandrehtrb.github.ioTechstory
calmpositive
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10/100
ExcelFrontend DevelopmentData Visualization
Key topics
Excel
Frontend Development
Data Visualization
The article explores using Excel as a frontend for data visualization and interaction, sparking discussion on its potential applications and limitations.
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- 01Story posted
Sep 29, 2025 at 8:42 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Sep 30, 2025 at 12:04 PM EDT
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3 months ago
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Spreadsheets just work, perhaps so well that they have become victims of their own success. They are such effective tools that they are lumped in with other user facing office productivity software, and as a result they seem to be overlooked by more technical people with programming skills in other languages. I always thought the spreadsheet format could be expanded and improved to be able to handle more use cases and behave more like a normal program, but there has been shockingly little effort put into trying this out. At one point there was something that acted like a spreadsheet where any cell could be a python expression, but I think it's defunct now.
There will be no innovation from Microsoft on this front. We should really decouple the spreadsheet concept from excel the product.