1 pointby CherishRoby3 hours ago2 comments
  • JustinXie2 hours ago
    The R1C1 normalization is smart. Treating 5k copied formulas as one "finding" is the only way to avoid alert fatigue.

    Re: magic numbers, have you considered checking column headers as a signal? E.g., if a header contains "Rate" or "Months", a hardcoded number is likely a valid constant. If it's just "Total", * 1.2 is probably a hidden risk. How do you handle cases where the context is ambiguous?

    • CherishRoby2 hours ago
      Great question! I am using column headers as context signals. If a column is named 'Rate', 'Price', 'Percentage', or 'Count', I'm more lenient with constants in formulas referencing it. For ambiguous cases like 'Total', I currently flag it and let the user decide—which isn't ideal. I've been considering a confidence score system where:

      High confidence whitelist: 24, 60, 7, 365 (time conversions) Context-dependent: numbers near column headers with semantic meaning Always flag: arbitrary numbers like 1.2, 847, etc. unless they're in a 'Constants' or 'Assumptions' section

      The hardest edge case is something like Revenue * 0.15 where 0.15 might be a legitimate tax rate OR a hardcoded assumption that should be in a named cell. Right now I flag it as medium priority. How would you approach this?

  • CherishRoby2 hours ago
    Spreadsheets are the only programming language where approximate string matching is the default behavior (VLOOKUP with range_lookup=TRUE). I can't think of another language where fuzzy matching happens silently unless you explicitly opt out. Is this the most dangerous design decision in computing history?