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