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This seems like it would be a great idea if it can be done because the market for it would probably be very large. However it seems to me that doing this would
by tgflynn 11y ago
This seems like it would be a great idea if it can be done because the market for it would probably be very large.
However it seems to me that doing this would be very difficult for at least 2 main reasons.
First spreadsheets can be organized in essentially arbitrary ways and there is no standard way of defining the semantics of data in them. There can also be all sorts of references between data items and unlike SQL there is nothing to explicitly define the nature of these references. How could a program take an arbitrary collection of spreadsheets and transform them into a webapp that has significantly more functionality than just loading them into Google docs ?
Second spreadsheets often use macros and other programming constructs so I think you also have the problem of building a general translator from macros/VB/Excel functions to javascript/whatever backend language you're using. This again seems like a fairly difficult problem to tackle in general.
- singold 11y agoI agree with you that it is a difficult problem to tackle and I've been thinking partly on what you say. About your first point there are two important things, first that we are going to start with simple spreadsheets and then evolve to more complex ones. And second that we are going to have some user interaction, because there is a lot of information that is in the user's head that we can't infer only from the data. About the second point, the first "simple" spreadsheets are going to be (probably) without macros, etc. (anyway at the start we can do ThingsThatDontScale(TM)). I think that making a transpiler from excel functions to a programming language shouldn't be that difficult, but the macros are a totally different beast. Thanks for your reply!