Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?

• mito

  18 2,210 10.0 Python

  The mitosheet package, trymito.io, and other public Mito code.

  

Thanks for posting! I love the topic - I've written before [1] about how I think spreadsheets are the most popular programming paradigm ever, we just don't talk about it much.

I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the past 2 years building Mito [2].

Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your JupyterLab environment. You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits. Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but instead of generating scummy-crummy VBA code, it generates Python.

We currently have two types of users. 1) Excel users from a huge variety of industries who are somewhere in their journey to learning Python - and Mito helps them write Python scripts quickly and make that transition easier. 2) Python users who prefer using Mito because of it's visual interface. I pretty much only use Mito when I'm trying to pivot or graph data - some things really just are better visually, especially when you get code out that you can edit if you want!

We're open core [3], and also sell a Pro and Enterprise versions of the tool with advanced functionality. We've been steadily growing for the past year or so, as the product has improved (first time founder here!).

Feedback greatly appreciated!

[1] https://naterush.io/blog/Spreadsheets-are-the-Ultimate-Progr...

[2] https://trymito.io

[3] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo

• teapot

  1 5 0.0 C

  Rescued x86 source files for the Teapot spreadsheet editor, as the original hosting-site (https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/) has gone down. Update: the site seems to be back up now.

and a terminal attached to it.

https://github.com/samuelludwig/teapot

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• SheetJS js-xlsx

  61 34,449 4.9 JavaScript

  📗 SheetJS Spreadsheet Data Toolkit -- New home https://git.sheetjs.com/SheetJS/sheetjs

  

The full story is really cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Herndon (tl;dr: graduate student tried to replicate results, fails to replicate, reaches out to the authors, finally receives the spreadsheet and finds formula errors)

There are a number of huge blunders due to poor error handling. COVID cases in the UK were underreported due to a lack of understanding of the XLS format limitations (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988)

Shameless plug: a large part of why we maintain an open source library for processing spreadsheets (https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs) is because the tooling around spreadsheets is lackluster. We hope to enable the next generation of data tools

• github-orgmode-tests

  245 147 4.8

  This is a test project where you can explore how github interprets Org-mode files

Using Org mode [1] and for example EasyOrg [2] does pretty much that. You can use tags, links etc and filter and sort on text and tags. In the case of EasyOrg you would use the Agenda's List view and for the paragraphs to show up in the Agenda they have to start with TODO (or a custom state, i.e. '* DATA My link number one'). The document preview does not support filtering.

[1] https://orgmode.org

• prosto

  9 89 3.6 Python

  Prosto is a data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby

One idea is to use columns instead of cells. Each column has a definition in terms of other columns which might also be defined in terms of other columns. If you change value(s) in some source column then these changes will propagate through the graph of these column definitions. Some fragments of this general idea were implemented in different systems, for example, Power BI or Airtable.

This approach was formalized in the concept-oriented model of data which relies on two basic elements: mathematical functions and mathematical sets. In contrast, most traditional data models rely on only sets. Functions are implemented as columns. The main difficulty in any formalization is how to deal with columns in multiple tables.

This approach was implemented in the Prosto data processing toolkit: https://github.com/asavinov/prosto

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

Suggest a related project