Jon Udell on the Nerd's Spreadsheet

rcs1000 writes "Jon Udell has a interesting article on a new type of spreadsheet: one targeted specifically at techies. The skinny is that any spreadsheet is actually a computer program, only in Resolver One, the product profiled in Udell's piece, this is explicit rather than implicit. And the code is IronPython rather than VBA. There are some other cool things it does — allowing cells to contain objects, and allowing spreadsheets to back-end websites." Udell's screencast gives a good demo, though the presenters are a bit hard to hear due to the phone connection. Resolver's own screencast is an alternative.

Comments

Re:Why should I use this rather than SQL?

[PJ1216]

i don't think its a matter of storing data (or at least large amounts). thats never what spreadsheets were for. they were based more around displaying data and processing data. yes, they can be used for large amounts, but they never really were meant as storage in the same way a database was. they're just saying these spreadsheets could start serving some of the same purposes.

2D programming?

[16384]

Organising code on a spreadsheet... I guess it will resemble Befunge

Re:Misuse of spreadsheets

[voidspace]

"A good portion of spreadsheets actually should be database tables of some kind." Databses are good for storing data and spreadsheets are great for analysing and presenting data. Resolver works very well with databases and so makes it easier to keep your data there - and still have a powerful analysis / presentation tool.

Re:Misuse of spreadsheets

[DragonWriter]

A good portion of spreadsheets actually should be database tables of some kind.

A good portion of spreadsheets are actually backed by database tables of some kind.

People end up manually grouping and other stuff that report-writers can do automatically. What is needed is a kind of "dynamic" RDBMS tool that has open-ended columns and column widths. A "spreadbase"? The Oracle clones are all too rigid.

While I think you are selling Oracle and its object-relational kin short if you think they can't handle what you seem to be describing, a more simply "flexible" approach is that taken by, e.g., SQLite where types are advisory rather than rigid. But in either case the DBMS is just the back-end storage engine, you still need a front-end piece that the business user can interact with in a friendly, visual way or program if necessary, that's where something spreadsheet-like comes in. Resolver one seems, at the outline level, to be a good way of approaching that.

Re:Logical conclusion

[Ed Avis]

It's been done: Pipedream by Mark Colton (also called View Professional) was a combined spreadsheet-WP-database app that ran on the BBC Micro, Archimedes and (even more weirdly) the Sinclair Z88 laptop computer. This Z88 review has a section describing Pipedream.