Transcend Cells, Sheets & Tabs with Ravel

The basic entity in a spreadsheet is the cell, and data analysis in a spreadsheet requires the use of cell reference formulas. It’s easy to write simple formulas in a spreadsheet, but the task becomes unwieldy with complex formulas, or once you need more than simply row and column coordinates to characterize your data. Cell reference formulas are also inherently unauditable.

Spreadsheets and “Business Intelligence” (BI) programs like Power BI and Tableau get around these limitations using Pivot Tables. But most spreadsheet users don’t touch the Pivot Table feature in Excel and its rivals because they find them difficult to use, while only professional data analysts use BI programs. Ravel is both far easier to use than a Pivot Table, and far more powerful than a Pivot Table.

The basic entity in Ravel is an inherently multi-dimensional object we call a Ravel—see Figure 16, which shows a 4-dimensional Ravel.

Figure 16: A Ravel with 4 dimensions

Manipulating a Ravel is easy: you use the axes of the Ravel to control the data it outputs. Figure 17 shows that same Ravel, set up to output the average private non-financial sector debt level across the 43 countries in the database, as a percentage of GDP, for all quarters between 1955 and 2022.

Figure 17: A Ravel returning the average private debt level across 43 countries, between 1955 and 2022, as a percentage of GDP