Vin Brocki: Blogging

There is something wonderfully deceptive about a spreadsheet.

Visitors to this blog may know of my effort to build a catalog of my wife’s artwork. The ultimate goal is a rather exciting one: I want to showcase her creations on my website in a virtual museum. The spreadsheet is the backstage crew that will help make this possible. Before the virtual doors open and the artwork takes center stage, somebody has to make sure all the information behind the scenes is organized properly.

And I am discovering that spreadsheets have a very low tolerance for artistic interpretation.

Consider the humble space.

You and I barely notice one. We use them constantly. In fact, we put spaces between words with such enthusiasm that civilization would probably collapse without them.

But computers? Computers can be downright petty about spaces. One extra space before or after an entry can make the information in a cell almost invisible to the immutable logic of the computer software.

This is one of those situations where creativity and technology find themselves on opposite sides of the room.

My wife created artwork. Her process involved imagination, experimentation, vision, and lots of practice with a digital pencil. I, on the other hand, am sitting at the computer worrying about whether a cell contains precisely the right number of invisible characters.

There is something almost poetic about it.

She made art. I get to make sure the database doesn't have a nervous breakdown.

This is where I find myself wishing that autocorrect would grow up a little.

We've had autocorrect for years. It can recognize that you probably meant one word instead of another and it can help fix spelling mistakes on the fly. But spreadsheets need something more sophisticated. Imagine an AI-assisted version of Numbers that actually understands the patterns in the spreadsheet as you're building it.

It could notice that I have entered a term like “portrait” dozens of times. Then it encounters “portrait “ with an extra space. Instead of throwing a hissy fit somewhere down the line, it could simply ask: “This appears to differ from your existing entries only because of an extra space. Would you like me to make it consistent?”

Yes.

Yes, artificial intelligence. Please save me from the spacebar.

That's the kind of intelligence I would welcome, consistently.

Vin Brocki, Erie, PA, USA

August 31, 2026