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A killer app would be a spreadsheet format that worked as well as source code as storage format for a spreadsheet application. Something that was designed for m
by mongol 5y ago
A killer app would be a spreadsheet format that worked as well as source code as storage format for a spreadsheet application. Something that was designed for manual editing in two different ways, in text editors and in a "cell editor". That would support all version control use cases that developers are familiar with and that have been best practice for decades.
Perhaps all that is needed is to port OpenOffice to the sc format (and extend it in the spirit it works now)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sneak 5y agoThis might be able to be achieved with a new serialization format for xls files. Something line-based, with canonicalized sorting of cells.
- breck 5y agoAt my last job at OurWorldInData we made something like this. One of the head researchers would build sophisticated spreadsheets containing all the transformations and views our users could do, and rather than re-implement that logic in Typescript, we saved it as TSV and built a spreadsheet editor for the researchers to use. From a code perspective it was just a tree to traverse. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k Changes in the spreadsheet UI then work really well with git. For example: https://github.com/owid/owid-content/commit/37ef12d65655fa144ed1d9dc53cf8f5bbb952c67 https://github.com/owid/owid-content/commit/37ef12d65655fa14...
- mongol 5y agoI did not really understand that demo. What was different compared to a regular spreadsheet?
- breck 5y agoIt is a strongly typed grammar backed spreadsheet that maps to a tree. The grammar enables the autocomplete, error checking, secondary notations, and so forth. Not sure if that explains it. From a different perspective: other programmers can work with the programs generated by it without knowing that it’s a spreadsheet.