Does Visidata have cell formulas?

[halloleo]

I use Visidata more and more, but there's still a use case I reach for Excel: When I quickly want to model something with some cell formulas.

I know I can apply transformations to columns, create new columns via external formulas from given columns, etc in Visidata. But In Excel it is very powerful to have a formula in a cell which then auto-updates.

Does Visidata have this and I just missed it?

---

Side note: I started to look at sc-im for this, but I'm a lot more familiar with vd and it's powers, so if I find this here, I'd stick with Visidata. 😄

[saulpw]

Well, what if there were a new type of Sheet, which had varname, formula, and eval(formula) columns, and you could use the values in the varname column in the formula column to refer to the eval'ed result. How far does that get you?

[halloleo]

Interesting! Definitely something to try out!

Do I understand it correctly that you suggest something like a 1-dimensional "Excel"? -- The advantage over Excel would be that the flow is probably easier to follow; the disadvantages might be that it needs more thought to organise your model.

[saulpw]

Yes, exactly, a 1D Excel. It might require thinking a bit differently than we're used to with cell-based spreadsheets, but of course VisiData is not a spreadsheet, with all the incumbent advantages and disadvantages =)

The nice thing about doing it this way, is that it would use the same core lookup functionality that some other people want (e.g. #1648), and otherwise just take an hour or two of putting it together.

[halloleo]

Cool! Thanks for confirming this.