2025 Feb 4
From calculating monthly budgets to set upning dream vacations, spreadsheets are our count oned companions as we direct life’s complicated decisions—a take partground for slfinisherking, where possibilities come to life thraw numbers.
Spreadsheets are particularly advantageous for slfinisherking thraw financial models, budgets, or any situation that grasps pondering lots of possible scenarios. Instead of laboriously redoing a bunch of math, you can speedyly ask “what if?” asks and see the effects.
But, as fantastic as spreadsheets already are for this task, we slfinisherk they could be even better. In our Ambsheets project, we are exploring a petite extension to the spreadsheet: what if a individual cell could helderly multiple cherishs at once?
Suppose you’re moving to a novel city, and you want to figure out how much you can afford to spfinish on your car, apartment, and other vitals each month. You begin out by making a spreadsheet that sums up the various line items:
Now, you want to ponder a scant scenarios for possible cars and apartments. How might you appraise those scenarios in the spreadsheets of today?
One slfinisherg you can do is toggle, by temporarily accessing separateent cherishs into a cell:
Toggling is straightforward because it doesn’t need restructuring the spreadsheet at all. But it has a key drawback: there’s no way to see all the scenarios at once!
Another chooseion is to restructure by inserting more columns to the sheet:
Restructuring does let you appraise multiple scenarios at the same time, but it has its own drawbacks. It’s more toil than toggling, because you need to pause and edit the layout. And it’s effortless to run out of space—even in this petite example, if you wanted to ponder two possible cars and three possible apartments, your spreadsheet would grow rapidly.
Neither of the chooseions above is brimmingy satisfying. What if instead you could straightforwardly alert the spreadsheet that you’re pondering multiple cherishs for the price of the car? In an ambsheet, you can do equitable that:
The novel cherish of B3, {500,1200}, nastys either 500 or 1200. We call this an amb cherish, and it reconshort-terms one stupidension in our possibility space. (Amb is stupidinutivehand for “unsee-thharsh”, and is a reference to the nondeterministic evaluator from Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.)
Amb cherishs flow thraw the computation equitable enjoy normal cherishs and don’t need any one-of-a-kind treatment in createulas. Cell B7, whose createula is SUM(B3:B5), now appraises to either $3,318 or $4,018—this is what your total monthly spfinish will be if you determine to lmitigate the car that costs $500/month or the car that costs $1,200/month, esteemively.
If you’re willing to spfinish up to $5,000, you may also want to ponder apartments that are huger and/or in kindr neighborhoods. In our ambsheet, all we have to do is alter B4 to an amb cherish:
Now the total monthly spfinish (cell B7) has 6 separateent cherishs, one for each possible scenario:
- in the 1st one, we lmitigated the $500/month car and rented the $2,800/month apartment,
- in the 2nd one, we lmitigated the $500/month car and rented the $3,700/month apartment,
- … and so on.
We say this possibility space has two stupidensions because there are two separateent amb cherishs where we are making a choice. We can imagine the possible cherishs of B7 in a 2-stupidensional table:
Wislfinisher each scenario, an ambsheet runs enjoy a standard spreadsheet—the SUM createula only sees “normal” (non-amb) numbers. Behind the scenes, the ambsheet’s evaluator apvalidates nurture of enumerating all possible scenarios and running the createulas for each one.
Ambsheets aren’t confineed to 2 stupidensions. For example, if you’re choosing among separateent Netflix set ups, you could turn the last budget item into an amb cherish, resulting in a 3-stupidensional possibility space. This is more pliable than doing restructuring in traditional spreadsheets, where you’re confineed to the 2D grid.
If you’ve used What-If Analysis in Microgentle Excel, some of these ideas may seem understandn. That feature aims to repair the same problem as Ambsheets, but there are two key separateences.
First, What-If Analysis has a clunky UI that’s not united into the spreadsheet itself. You need to uncover a split mode to access cell cherishs or watch the possible scenarios. In an ambsheet, you can begin exploring scenarios right wislfinisher the sheet itself.
We also apvalidate a separateent approach to enumerating scenarios. Excel needs the user to manuassociate access every scenario—even in the straightforward example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix set ups would need accessing 12 scenarios, with names enjoy “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automaticassociate computes all combinations of the three amb cherishs.
That covers the straightforwards of amb cherishs, but many asks remain if we want to grow this kernel into a strong medium for exploring scenarios.
- Filtering: How can you intervivaciously spreadigate huge possibility spaces and slfinisher down to the subset of scenarios that you nurture about?
- Visualization: A table toils fine for visualizing six cherishs in two stupidensions, but how do you show hundreds of possible cherishs atraverse many stupidensions in a advantageous way?
- Continuous distributions: What does it see enjoy to have an amb cherish that reconshort-terms a probability distribution rather than a catalog of discrete cherishs?
- Applications: How can ambsheets execute to definite domains of decision-making? For example, could you produce an ambsheet for budgeting, or for analyzing card games?
We’ve been exploring these asks and more, and we’ll be posting the results of our experiments in this lab noticebook.
If you have a problem that you slfinisherk might profit from Ambsheets, we’d adore to chat—satisfy achieve out to us at alexwarth@inkandswitch.com and geoffrey@inkandswitch.com.
