Why is there not a market for spreadsheet templates?
- Why is there not a market for spreadsheet templates?
- One reason, spreadsheets intermix data and code, making them hard to separate into templates.
- Another part of the challenge is that spreadsheets have a lot of complex state that is almost entirely hidden.
- To understand someone else's spreadsheet you have to overturn every rock to see what logic's hiding there.
- You can't see it, it's hard to have the information scent of where to look first.
- But also if all of the details were visible you'd be overwhelmed by it.
- Humans and LLMs would both struggle.
- A tangled mess of wiring between cells.
- Finally, when the medium to express your ideas has no opinion, it just ends up being "just however you thought about it".
- Which is good for getting it out of your head.
- But inscrutable to everyone else.
- It's really hard for another person to orient what's going on.
- More degrees of freedom, create more things for others to have to orient in novelty.
- Templates are great to inspire you about what's possible, but people want to keep things as close to the way they think about them as possible.