Comment by lorenzowood
1 day ago
Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
This is really amazing, and it reminds me of an Excel modification I did 24 years ago for an animation studio. They had around 3,000 digital artists and then about 200 support staff, and around 8 different productions moving through the studio at the same time. Each production was at some different stage of completion. The studio's production management staff spent a huge amount of time negotiating what staff was assigned to what productions, and the reasonings were all hazy and non-fact based. So I wrote what people would now call a deep learning system that mined all the accounting and production tracking records the studio had, and created probability distributions and confidence intervals for every individual and every task, and every combination of people and their combined tasks, and that all composited together into a giant predictive engine of real time whatif scenarios for the entire studio in different configurations.
It was used for a series of feature films you all probably saw: the Chronicles of Narnia series, the Scooby Doo live action CG films, the Garfield films with the CG Garfield, and Life of PI.
People both loved and hated it. They loved the insights into the studio's capabilities, and they hated thinking through how the thing operated, and they hated the thought process of constructing a new whatif scenario, because they had to THINK.
I'd say a broader "people has to WORK" about various accounting systems I developed. E.g. to make something warehousable, people need to enter various details about their products, and they hate it. And Amazon shows us that marketplace can be successful without even basic weight and dimensions.
First thing that came to mind is: can this model correlation between each cell, or does it assume that all cells are independent?
For example, in this https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/2205 hours of sleep per night is perhaps correlated with hours per weekday commuting. You might not have the data, but if you do, it could improve the probability distribution in the "weekday hours occupied" cell
Wow, this is incredibly cool. I can't believe this stuff hasn't been ported into Excel.
From this fact alone you can infer that 80-90% of people use excel as a glorified calculator.
Right, and that's why it doesn't really matter what innovative things don't get added to Excel because people wouldn't be using them.
Spreadsheets at their core are a visual intetaction model; a table with cells that can affect other cells. Beyond that core, you can do whatever you want - including with Excel, so the 10% that don't want to treated as a calculator can do so with a little bit of bespoke programming.
I've implemented several business applications where Excel was the user agent against specialized backend services. This was before the browser took over the front end in developer's mindset.
And a glorified database, and chart making tool, and whatever business app they can hack together.
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