The Pain of Three-Dimensional Tables

Yet another link from Patrick O'Beirne, this time to Cool Anago Demo in Thomas de Nooij's blog Thomas on Spreadsheets . Thomas is writing about Anago Assemble, which enables users to specify business calculations visually — "without programming" — by graphically "wiring" inputs, calculators, and outputs together. The point of it for "How NOT to Use Excel" is that Thomas justifies using Anago Assemble by mentioning something that's hard to do in Excel: create a spreadsheet that calculates Sales per product from Units Sold per Customer, Product and Month. This needs a three-dimensional table. But Excel doesn't have three-dimensional tables. OK, so you flatten the table. Simple? Thomas explains why it isn't.