Like Ms Excel, Pivot Tables Never Die
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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Data AnalysisPivot TablesBusiness Intelligence
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Data Analysis
Pivot Tables
Business Intelligence
The article argues that pivot tables remain a vital tool in data analysis, and the discussion highlights their continued relevance and versatility in various industries.
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There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.
For any spreadsheet which are updated by refreshing source data such as CSV output from other systems, PowerQuery is what should be used and is very effective.
The typical windows user is not going to be accomplish a successful import, except maybe by whatever the heck PowerQuery is.
It suffers from trying to do too many things at once, though. Excel 3 is enough for those use cases without being a complete nightmare for everyone else. Electronic spreadsheets as a concepts are genius, it's the implementation I hate.
WHY wouldn't Microsoft just run it in the local interpreter on the machine?
Probably to tighten vendor lock-in.
But using a spreadsheet to store data is completely reasonable. We delude ourselves as technically experienced people when we imply otherwise. When Excel fucks up data (perhaps the most unforgivable sin in all of software) with unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting (i.e. "trying to be clever"), it's absolutely out of touch to point the finger at the end user.
Agree. Soooo many leading zeroes have been striped from ZIP codes.
Equally as bad is no visual indicator to distinguish formula cell from static cells. Easy to silently overwrite formulas with a careless paste.
It's not just that making it a bad product. Those are minor annoyances when compared with it trying to keep your data hostage in opaque formats[1] and exfiltrating your data to the cloud[2].
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...
[2] https://superuser.com/questions/1903431/how-to-stop-excel-36...
Is Python is still a metered cloud runtime?
2. Idk, just asking.
It seems like the page updates the page url every time you scroll to a new section, which means you end up with 10+ history entries for the page if you scroll all the way through. To exit out of the page you'd have to click back 10+ times to go through those history entries. Google maps does something similar, where it adds a new entry to history every time you pan, which means your history is polluted with entries for google maps.
> The enduring power of pivot tables is their robustness, simple usage, and fast, interactive response. It's the Lingua Franca of data if you are not fluent in the language of SQL or Python. A common language everyone understands: the top management, domain experts, and developers. It's an interface to data; it's the first no-code interface. Instead of the multidimensional query language MDX or the newer DAX, people can use a simple drag-and-drop interface. It democratized data analysis.
Microsoft copied the basic concept from Lotus, and Borland also copied it etc...
Essentially you have some maximal resource, i.e. money, and you are trying to figure out how it can be used most effectively under several constraints (don't have to be linear).
I remember distinctly having the calculate them by hand in an A-level math exam in the UK.
The pivot table, the spreadsheet's most powerful tool (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820877 - Oct 2023 (192 comments)