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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.
Multiply 850*77.1 correctly?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
SQL databases have become much lighter and more efficient these days. Why should I use this store data over a lightweight SQL database?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Organising code on a spreadsheet... I guess it will resemble Befunge
and allowing spreadsheets to back-end websites
munge them?
hack them?
copulate with them?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer.
Spreadsheets are so useful today that they can do many tasks that are better done with other tools... If you know the other tools.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A good portion of spreadsheets actually should be 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.
As far as spreadsheets for programming, I've experimented a lot with data dictionaries to simplify column management and column sub-sets for regular ol' edit-and-report screens. So far it is tricky because one often wants to tweak something for a particular context and one-size-fits-all hits a wall. The trick is finding a good, clean way to "override" specifics from the table when needed or just make alternative entries of a given column and select them via set notation when needed; but I've yet to find a clean, simple convention. It ends up fairly messy such that regular copy-and-paste is unfortunately the cleaner solution much of the time. Maybe if the toolset and the language was geared toward nimble data dictionaries, these approaches would be smoother. Forcing a non-data-oriented language to act data-oriented is like trying to keep a toddler in line.
Table-ized A.I.
Wow... that screencast is perfect for me to sit facing the screen with my eyes closed, and anyone that walks past my cube will think i'm doing some spreadsheet wizardry....
nice. Now i'll go someway toward meeting the quota for those that sleep at work.
And does it poorly. And insecurely.
You can already access spreadsheet content from Visual Basic, and include VB script in spreadsheets. The same scripting ability which allows the "wow" features in spreadsheets also creates the potential for abuse - remember macro viruses? Suddenly, documents which formerly contained only data now contained executable code, and it gave rise to a security nightmare.
Yes, today, with VBA, you can do what the article mentions. In fact, it's been possible for years. Problem is that:
- Very few people use it, and
- Those who do use it tend to use it poorly.
Yes, you can back end a website with your spreadsheet. But why would you? A spreadsheet is a horrible way to manage data; there's no referential integrity checks, no versioning, no security, and doesn't scale well. Furthermore, your crucial data is tied to a particular application, rather than a database.Just like VBA, it's a nice nerd's toy, but the wise system programmer recognizes that it has limitations.
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