3 ms·

I am actually amazed at how heavily some fortune 500 companies I have worked for relied on Excel as both a database, and repository for what is sometimes the on

• stcredzero 16y ago
  How about a combined backup/sync solution for Excel spreadsheets? The sync portion could work like Dropbox, but the daemon would only pay attention to Excel files on a given machine, or in a folder, like a user's home directory. There would be a company account on a website or a locally running web appliance, where users could share spreadsheets, particular pages in a spreadsheet, or even particular cells. This would be combined with an Excel macro that can pull-down such shared data from the account website. Updates to data would only be sent when the spreadsheet is saved and uploaded by the local daemon. This could even be automated by screen-scraping Excel running on virtualized Windows instances.
  • jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
    A automagically simple syncing solution for excel data ala dropbox would be great and a hell of a start. This might even be a nice app for the dropbox api.
    • stcredzero 16y ago
      It wouldn't only be a great place to start. Once everyone's spreadsheets are backed up, you automatically have a repository of all of their data, which can be federated, shared, synced, data-mined, displayed in a web app, etc...
      • jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
        Doing this with the new open source dropbox thingy Sparkle would be great. I like it because it doesn't force people to switch from Excel, but adds another awesome layer: web access, versioning, syncing,etc.
  • sundae79 16y ago
    I believe its called EssBase.
    • stcredzero 16y ago
      Not exactly. What I'm proposing is much simpler and lighter weight.
      • jarek 16y ago
        I'm not convinced there's such a thing as "simpler and lighter weight" when it comes to Fortune 500 companies.