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VisiCalc Creator Developing WikiCalc
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an article about a new wiki that is trying to combine the collaboration of wiki technology and the data manipulation attributes of a spreadsheet. The creator of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin, is working on an alpha version of WikiCalc for sometime late in February." From the article: "'It holds a lot of promise, both because it's using the spreadsheet metaphor, which is the one thing people know for working with quantitative information and because 'there's nobody better in the world to build this thing,' said Ross Mayfield, CEO of collaboration software maker SocialText. To Mayfield, WikiCalc is the answer to a problem that has been percolating for some time in the world of IT. That is, he said, that spreadsheets have traditionally been a single-user application screaming for functionality that could let multiple people edit data quickly and easily. "
Perhaps many business won't need it, but I know a lot people who will. The combination of a web interface with easy and intuitive (read: not MS Office's reviewing features) multi-user functionality could help, for example, a manager easily collect numbers from multiple people on a team. For the manager, all the data is in one location as it comes in and accessible when he wants it, not as emails with separate Excel attachments which he has to paste together. Or if I'm collecting data in my lab but want to review it at home, then I can just use an online spreadsheet and don't have to do the usual transfer via network/ftp/usb/email/cvs. Believe me, the applications for online tools ARE out there -- there's a reason Microsoft is releasing their uncharacteristic Windows Live nonsense.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
This sounds pretty similar to JotSpot Tracker.
Personally, I was disappointed when I found that spreadsheets only ran the formulas forward so that if I typed in A1=2*B2 it wouldn't work out B2 from A1. Seems almost as useless as formattable grid to me.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
But "supercharging" spreadsheets won't really be providing power to the people that need it. The people that most need power over large amounts of data have hundreds of people working in their IT departments.
Your last sentence summed it up very well: companies presently pay a LOT of people simply to move data from app to app. A collaborative spreadsheet could change workflows in significant ways that we, having never before used such an app, cannot readily predict.
I think it's a bloody fantastic idea, and so simple and obvious it seems odd to think such an app doesn't yet exist.
Shared workbooks in Excel are very good for specific instances: they work fine, so longs as the datasets aren't huge, everyone knows when they're going to synchronise/update, nobody, but nobody get's a connection problem, Excel doesn't crash and nobody's box goes down. And if one of those happens mid-save, your spreadsheet could be toast.
Excel has many features that allow it to be used as a sort of database - I've even seen heavily 'locked down' workbooks relying on enormous quantities of VBA code working as client applications to databases. Encouraging that, though, is a sure-fire way to ensure that you IT/IS department will have to intervene when the next system upgrade breaks something.
Don't use them for anything mission-critical. That would be silly. You'd even be safer with Access for that.
Sounds a lot like the turbodbadmin demo to me... just with support for formulas.
http://turboajax.com/turbodbadmin.html
in other words, "ajax-based web spreadsheet that uses a databse for backend datastore"
Great idea - it effectively could kill excel for always-connected corporate environments where people are constantly fighting with different spreadsheet revisions and 2nd hand data.
Give users the interface they know and mostly seem to love. No stupid ODBC drivers necessary. Works in any modern browser. Give the company accurate data in a real database. Win-Win.
I've got another one:
In my small business, I have to send my accountant monthly spreadsheets of the bank activity, what invoices I've sent, and what expenses I've claimed. Pretty simple stuff.
Now if I have two people doing that, we can both be adding stuff in, and our accountant gets to see it as it happens.
Granted, this is possible with Excel sharing, or SharePoint, but the point here being that (a) it's simple and (b) is web based and (c) it doesn't require all of us to share a fileserver and (d) it's open (standards|source).
If I could convince my accountant to use something like this, it would save a lot of batting spreadsheets about (since we don't share a file server).
I'm not convinced it's 'revolutionary' (or even that unique), but It's certainly a Good Thing, and no doubt has possibilities I/we haven't thought of (just like Wikis a few years back).
because one cell got separated from its brethren in a sort.
I was "upgraded" to excel 2003 this summer, which caused such a decrease in my productivity.
One new "feature" is that the ever ubiquitous ctrl-A, which every other app, and all older versions of Excel used to "select ALL", no longer selects ALL. Excel 2003 now tries to look at the group of cells you're currently sitting in, and selects what it thinks is a convenient group. The problem is, if there's a gap in a column, it won't reach across all of your data - just to that column-border.
So, you do a ctrl-A, and a sort, and all of a sudden all your data is no longer correctly associated across the row like it used to be.
What a great surprise that was, to get this great new feature... especially when I got to throw out an entire day's work because I had no way to rearrange my data back into the correct order.
The fix is to use the box at the corner of column letters and row numbers (upper left). Or, as is entirely obvious, and just like all other aps... hit ctrl-A twice.
Thank you, Microsoft.
>Spreadsheets exist to capture the structure of calculations. Data should as far as possible never go in them.
I see your point -- there are these things called "data"bases for storing data, which have a lot of features for keeping the data safer and more meaningful than it would be in a spreadsheet.
On the other hand, one of the stories about usability engineering was that Microsoft discovered that customers were using Excel to store lists of things, so they added features to speed up creating and sorting lists of things. Pursuing usability took them further from the path you identified as good design.