spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are remarkably flexible things. They are probably the single most common vector for "citizen programming" in the world at large, and they can easily do simple databaselike tasks, as well as their intended calculation roles. That said, I find it surprising that Excel looks so very much like its ancient ancestor, Visicalc. Occasionally slightly cooler graphing packages or actual new ways of data manipulation show up, but it's been rare over the years.
In 2004 or so I sat through a presentation by a gentleman from Microsoft, explaining that the next step in the evolution of the Office suite was collaboration tools. That's very nice, but there were so many times I would have torn off my own arm to get more than 256 columns and more than 65536 rows into the damn thing.
Instead, having settled on the exact form of the thing, we reject new ways to do the same tasks. Simple features like being able to rename columns and use those columns in formulas, an innovation first shown in Lotus Improv, was rejected and dissapeared long ago: why? Examine Christopher Browne's history for a taste of what could have been.
So when I saw Google's recent entry into the web-based productivity suite I was a bit surprised and a bit saddened, and not at all by what it does but instead by what it does not do.
Comments
FYI, Office 2007 will have support for significantly more than the 256x65536 size spreadsheet.
I still see your point - this would have been nice a couple versions ago.
- JJ
Can you really be saddened by Google Spreadsheets at this point. It is a new product and knowing how Google releases products you should know that it is not going to be a robust tool right at first.
Request the features you've mentioned and encourage others to do the same. I don't think you can fully judge the product, especially with it just coming out for a limited test.
- Dan
Dan,
I'm not talking about features so much as the opportunity for fundamental reconception of the interface and mechanism. The inception of a project is the perfect time to do so. So I guess I'm more sad that their goal was "copy excel" rather than clearly articulate some actual user need and solve that.
- joshua
I used to work as a Java programmer for a financial company in Denver, and I found myself perpetually annoyed by spreadsheet fanatics who insisted that some programming task couldn't be *that* difficult because they could do it in Excel. Damn citizen programmers!
- Buzz Andersen