Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios

"what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?"

Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well.

I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?

The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting.

It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space.

It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this

This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code.

https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/

https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/

are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.

It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space.

1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so maybe I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that.

2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?).

This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown.

It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.

This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)

I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.

Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0]

[0] https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/

At this point I think I'd just resort to throwing together a quick script in Python or Julia to run the scenarios.