Comment by herbst
16 hours ago
Same thoughts here. The comments in here make it sounds like a good idea. But isn't the whole idea behind excel (and any spreadsheet really) to have all data flat into sheets. For me the idea alone seems to break the whole concept
Keeping all values of a cell as scalars is literally First Normal Form in database normalisation; it brings myriad design benefits.
But Excel is not a relational database: for simple cases, having an extra table for a non-scalar column is awfully confusing to present to an end-user. From that angle this makes total sense. There's still 1NF for more complex embeddings, anyhow
I totally see the use case. I just think it's a book I wouldn't want to open when my aim is to keep the software rational and sane.