The Pain of Resizing Tables

Since the previous entry refers to one piece of spreadsheet-replacement software, I reckon it's OK to mention my own Excelsior, which generates.spreadsheets from input files that describe spreadsheets as collections of tables, related by formulae. If a spreadsheet needs many tables all the same size and shape, you can make these all depend on the same constants in the input file. Changing the constants will resize all the tables. In How To Avoid Hours Of Tedious Spreadsheet Editing, I tell how I used Excelsior to resize the 60 20-by-40 tables in a 10,000-cell spreadsheet that modelled stocks of social housing, so that we could generate new spreadsheets with differently sized tables in just a few minutes. As with the previous blog entry, the point is that the need for other software demonstrates something Excel is bad at: having lots and lots of tables whose sizes need to be changed together. More generally, Excel just is not very good at producing "families" of spreadsheets, identical except for the shape and size of certain regions.