Show HN: An Excel addin to automatically use cell names in formulas

4 points by evandwight 3 years ago · 1 comment · 1 min read

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Automatically convert Excel files formatted like the following:

     /* Tax rate */

     var b1 = 50%;

     /* Salary */

     var b2 = 120000;

     var b3 = b1 * b2;

To:

     var tax_rate = 50%;

     var salary = 120000;

     var b3 = tax_rate * salary;

I'm trying to improve the readability and feature discovery of excel by bringing linting and autoformatting to excel.

Currently there's only the one linting rule. What excel best practices would you like to see added?

evandwightOP 3 years ago

This was inspired by a hn comment that linked to "you suck at excel" [0].

First, I realized how much I suck at excel despite being in love with it. Excel just has so many features and the basics are good enough to solve most excel problems. This means I never search for a better method and only discover features through word of mouth.

Then, I realized many of the suggestions could be automatically applied (named cells, standardized color formatting, defined tables). Other suggestions could just be recommended (you seem to be using formulas to build a pivot table, click here to learn about pivot tables).

This seems to obvious so it probably exists. But I only found Microsoft's excellent excel static analysis addin ExcelLint.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

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Show HN: An Excel addin to automatically use cell names in formulas

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