Hi, my name is George Lungu and I am a circuit designer. This is my blog
June 30, 2018 10:25 AM   Subscribe

"Welcome to Excel Unusual, the home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets." How about a gated ring oscillator? Maybe some Pong? Surely you've time for a wireframe rollercoaster? And so on and so forth.

Why Excel?
Excel is cheap and ubiquitous, everyone has it.
Excel is a good environment to do complex programming without being a programmer (it gives you the feel of of a bread board). A donkey could use it…
As opposed to regular programming languages, Excel is a two-dimensional programming canvass
Excel has decent built in graphics (I like using 2D scatter plots)
Excel is a matrix calculator and it’s wickedly fast
Excel has decent GUI capabilities within the program itself
Programming in Excel gives you more understanding of physical processes than “black box” type programs such as Matlab, Simulink, Octave since in Excel you build everything from basic formulas
All right, Excel, but why Excel 2003?
2007 is very slow and bugsy. I might be translating some of the models in Excel 2010 which seems to be decent version.
posted by cortex (9 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
These are amazing. See also On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint.
posted by waninggibbon at 10:31 AM on June 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Note that the demos are hidden behind a "tweet or facebook" jail before you can see 'em, and the site degrades access if it detects an adblocker.
posted by scruss at 10:47 AM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have a long-running joke with a couple of friends who are developers. We'll need to do some random thing -- translate a bunch of binary into ASCII, or parse an error log, or manipulate text in some weird way, and they'll reach for whatever tool they're using at the moment -- bash, or python, or perl -- and I'll reach for Excel.

I mean, I know some code, I'm a hobbyist dev, but I've been using Excel for almost 30 years now and it's basically scratch paper for me at this point. Like, scratch paper that also has an advanced calculator and a pretty powerful logic engine built in. It's not always the easiest way to solve any given problem, but I start there a lot because it's so easy to start there. If nothing else you can use the grid layout to do kind of a mind-mapping thing and then start to model the relationships between various bits of ideas and data. And then sometimes it makes sense to take what I've started there and throw it into python or awk or something, and other times... nah, I'll just do it in Excel.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 11:30 AM on June 30, 2018 [18 favorites]


Whoa! Cool!
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 12:25 PM on June 30, 2018


I think this must be like the sit vs. stand of programming because I have to say I'm fairly baffled that people would know that matlab/python+numpy exist and still go ahead and (not as a joke or novelty) implement things like numeric heat diffusion simulations in excel.
posted by Pyry at 1:59 PM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm fairly baffled that people would know that matlab/python+numpy exist and still go ahead and (not as a joke or novelty) implement things like numeric heat diffusion simulations in excel.

I have done this, and not as a joke or novelty -- but also not because that was the problem I was actually trying to solve. That said, my circumstances were fairly unique (and Microsoft is my employer). It's pretty neat to set up a 2d heat diffusion simulation and then use conditional formatting / color scales to visualize the result.
posted by Slothrup at 2:21 PM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Is there a way to see the actual code without registering? If not, how are the moving wire frames done? I always thought Excel's graphs were static. Is the author just using Excel as an environment for VBA?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:12 PM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


There is probably VBA that handles the outermost loop of incrementing the time in some cell and replotting the graph once the spreadsheet has updated based on the new time.
posted by Pyry at 7:32 PM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


As one of two people in the company I work for who are considered the Excel Whizzes Who Can Solve Anything (not a boast; we just work with it all day and they don't), this is amazing and confirmation that I'm a total Excel novice when it comes down to it.
posted by Len at 10:26 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


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