Daniel T Li Spreadsheets Better Jun 2026

When people search for they often want to know what software he uses. His stack is agnostic but opinionated:

To explore how these spreadsheet design principles can be applied directly to your specific workflow, tell me a bit more about your current setup:

"How?" she breathed. "How did you fix the coffee stain?" daniel t li spreadsheets better

A tool that preserves the classic spreadsheet feel but completely reimagines the user experience, integrating built-in API connections and sleek, modular dashboards.

Spreadsheets provide high spatial context. You can view raw data, assumptions, calculations, and charts all on a single screen. This visual proximity allows the human brain to spot patterns, anomalies, and relationships that remain hidden when data is trapped inside a specialized app's user interface. When people search for they often want to

Use strict color conventions (e.g., blue text for manual inputs, black text for formulas) so anyone viewing the sheet knows what to touch and what to leave alone.

When you write a formula in a cell, you are programming. The brilliance of the spreadsheet architecture is that it provides instant feedback. In traditional programming or app development, you write code, compile it, and run it to see the output. In a spreadsheet, the data and the logic coexist in the same visual space. Spreadsheets provide high spatial context

This is perhaps the most significant tool for efficiency. Power Query allows users to connect, clean, and reshape data from external sources automatically, eliminating manual copy-pasting [2].

Li’s early work serves as a blueprint for how thoughtful practitioners can integrate AI into their spreadsheet workflows: use AI for tasks that are repetitive, language‑heavy, or require natural language understanding, but always verify outputs and design the spreadsheet so that AI results are clearly distinguished from deterministic formula results.

Each table operates on its own independent grid. Column widths in one table have zero impact on the table sitting two inches to its right. This layout flexibility allows teams to build visual dashboards that mimic how the human brain naturally organizes information: spatially and contextually. 2. Object-Oriented Data

for a simple data cleaning task.