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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. "
The ability to make more absolutely pointless spreadsheets.
Hell, why not just a regular wiki anyway? I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
a new wiki that is trying to combine the collaboration of wiki technology and the data manipulation attributes of a spreadsheet.
Isn't that how Enron ran its entire accounting department?
Trolling is a art,
spreadsheets have traditionally been a single-user application screaming for functionality that could let multiple people edit data quickly and easily.
Hence corporations all having relational databases with custom GUI applications. Spreadsheets are most useful for tabular data, which of course works well in relational database tables. While spreadsheets are great at free-form manipulation and "playing" with the data, it's the custom apps that are required to sqeeze that data into the corporation's customs workflows. For at least 20 years what corporations have been doing is creating the custom apps and having them export to more freeform data models like spreadsheets as needed. This seems to work pretty well.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
WikiCalc - the site where you get to decide what 2 + 2 equals...
This guy's the limit!
"With (Excel), you get people playing e-mail volleyball with attachments all day long, so it's grossly inefficient," Mayfield said. "How do you track changes on a spreadsheet? What happens if you don't have just two people going back and forth, (but) have a finance department of 40 people trying to roll up numbers."
Share the workbook and multiple people can edit at the same time. I do this daily and have been using this feature for quite some time. Changes are highlighted w/notes on who made what change whenever you save. I haven't played "e-mail volleyball" regarding spreadsheets.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Think about things like budgeting/forcasting in a large operation with multiple departments, all of whom need to work on their individual sections. You end up with either lots of spreadsheets that are linked together if you're lucky, or everyone taking turns at the master spreadsheet. If they get a decent selection of formulas working this could really simplify things for stuff like that.
What exactly would you do with a spreadsheet/wiki cross if you had one? I just can't visualize a use case. It sounds like the people doing this chose their product by taking a bag full of buzzwords written on refrigerator magnets and pulling out two at random. "Oh, we're going to make an AJAX... microcontroller!"
We have conference calls sitting around an excel sheet populated by other data, and we make our updates, save 'em, and let the main conference holders know, they reload, and its all populated and shared. In near-real time. And we use net meeting, too.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
...a new tool to add money to the big boys' pockets. Saw an interview with him years ago. He tried to make it sound as if creating a program that eventually put billions into the coffers at Lotus and Microsoft but left him with a teachers salary didn't sting all that much. But, it was evident in his eyes that he was stung and felt he missed the boat that made young millionaires out of the geeks of the late '70s.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I know there isn't an opensharepoint yet, but MS Sharepoint lets you do much of what they discuss. It was developed for exactly the same reasons, and it does a pretty good job if people know it and use it.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
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.
This is all well and good, until every cell reads "Penis".
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.
I have just started working on WiKiPooP.com. This is a colabrative site where people can help each other figure out how to poop. Anyone can edit anyone elses poop to make it more accurate and to the point. This just goes to show that the WiKi is the future of allt hings!.
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Dabble DB
On the Tools menu, click Share Workbook, and then click the Editing tab.
Select the Allow changes by more than one user at the same time check box.
Click the Advanced tab.
Under Track changes, click Keep change history for, and in the Days box, type the number of days of change history (change history: In a shared workbook, information that is maintained about changes made in past editing sessions. The information includes the name of the person who made each change, when the change was made, and what data was changed.) that you want to keep.
Be sure to enter a large-enough number of days because Microsoft Excel permanently erases any change history older than this number of days.
Click OK, and if prompted to save the file, click OK.
easy enough. Straght from TFM
The intricacies of spreadsheets make them much harder to edit in parallel. On a wikipedia entry it doesn't matter if one person edits something about the history of something while another person expands a section on the future. Aside from minor inconsistencies, which are easy to spot, the document is essentially the sum of its parts.
In contrast, the parts of a spreadsheet have strict dependencies that can span the spreadsheet and affect correctness in subtle ways. For example, if one person adds a row in one section, how should formulas in a different section react (do range references to the row above expand to encompass the new row or do range references to the row below expand or neither?). "Trace dependencies" functions can help but only if each editor recognizes that the scope of their edits is potentially unbounded.
The point is that it's harder to allow simultaneous independent edits because the internals of a spreasheet don't have independence.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Uh oh... Is "wiki" becoming the new "i" which was the new "e" a few years ago?
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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.
Yup. Now all we need is Michael Shrayer, the original author of The Electric Pencil, to write a decent wordprocessor / text editor for Wiki and we'll have an online Office replacement with wiki capabilities....
Oh how I love all the recent computing innovation!
Umm... NO, read the artical linked. Read the snpped section below and note how it specificly says "No ActiveX".
So what happened, exactly, to get the spreadsheet in the browser? Behind the scenes, Excel Services opened the file the sales analyst saved to SharePoint, refreshed any external data in the spreadsheet, calculated any formulas, and rendered the results in the browser. Specifically, Excel services sends only DHTML to the browser (no ActiveX), so the sales manager could be using any modern browser. The result is a very high-fidelity version of the analysis that the sales manager can interact with in the browser or, if they have permissions to do so, open up back in Excel. One point I want to make clear is that Excel 12 is the authoring tool for spreadsheets that run on Excel Services.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Let's see: WikiWord and WikiPoint and WikiPencil and WikiDraw and WikiPaint and WikiShop and WikiPage and WikiWeaver and.......
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
>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.