VisiCalc Creator Developing WikiCalc 139
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. "
Databases and custom UIs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't discount it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yup, exactly what buisness needs (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, he's handing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yup, exactly what buisness needs (Score:4, Insightful)
And I giggle because I'm a dino running on old, obsolete mainframe technology where the end user can't just slap something together and put it into production.
Re:Databases and custom UIs (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd go farther. Spreadsheets exist to capture the structure of calculations. Data should as far as possible never go in them. The only unequivocal exception to this are parameters used in the calculations (e.g. "assuming the rate of inflation is i...").
In practice people do have to stage derived data in their spreadsheets, but this is dangerous and leads down the road to the major use of spreadsheets in businesses today: as an ad hoc "direct manipulation" database. This is a dreadful, hair-raising practice. Many a time I've looked at results that don't make sense, because one cell got separated from its brethren in a sort.
Re:that's the point! (Score:2, Insightful)
Curse of dependencies (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yup, exactly what buisness needs (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly the reason that one of my favorite apps, OmniOutliner [omnigroup.com] (Mac OS X) was created.
"when the Excel product manager got up on stage at MacWorld several years ago and said, "We've found that 85% of our customers use Excel just to make lists and outlines," we (Omni) said, "Shoot, that'll be our next product. We can do a GOOD job of making lists and outlines, and sell it for a lot less."" -- Wil Shipley, Omni co-founder [wilshipley.com]
It seems like there might be a market opening up in the "things that people are already misusing Office for" sector.
Re:that's the point! (Score:3, Insightful)
And a podcast is just a RSS based distribution of sound and video media. But it is a good implementation and use of RSS, and a WikiCalc would be a great use of wiki.
Some of the best most obvious innovations seem rediculously obvious in hindsight, but that doesn't detract from their greatness (in fact, you could just say they were elegant [retrologic.com])