Comment by yunruse
19 hours ago
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.