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I'm torn on this. I think many saas type services can be a spreadsheet, but excel is only 98% of the way there. Because the main issue with excel is that it is

I'm torn on this. I think many saas type services can be a spreadsheet, but excel is only 98% of the way there. Because the main issue with excel is that it is local only and even then cannot be accessed even by other local programs. Hence all the wacky VBA "scripts" that turn into full flegded programs. I wish excel _would_ become a database, that is, a frontend to a postgres instance that could be run locally or on a server. Then we just set the postgresql srting in our app and everything just works: excel is the frontend, special features run in a sane programming language, can be updated seperately ect. Since that will nerver happen, someone needs to make an open source speadsheet that runs on postgres. And yes, it does have to be open source because otherwise nobody will learn it. And it needs at least 80% feature parity with excel.

eternityforest 4y ago
The trouble with that is it's a central server which means an IT department to fuss with it. Better would be something like Excel but that works P2P like SyncThing, or even directly using SyncThing itself. I don't think it would actually be too hard as long as you didn't need truly realtime collaboration if you used file sync as your backend, and gave up on the 2D sheet model in favor of a table/records model that lends itself to conflict free operations instead of edits to specific numbered cells.
accountinhn 4y ago
Excel can connect to postgres - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2T7xdNZ3Qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2T7xdNZ3Qc That combined with some thing like Office365 or Dropbox type service and we have what you might be describing.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
  I am well aware of ODBC. Critically you cannot edit the database itself, only copy from it. This makes sense so as not to let some sales guy tank an entire company becuase he misspelled a formula. What I mean is a spreadsheet that literally runs on a database. It could even be sqlite, _anything_ that allows two way communication between the slreadsheet and the application. spreadsheet gui <--> database <--> application The spreadsheet does simple data manipulation and acts as a GUI The database can be mysql, postgres, sqlite (even JSON...) The application does batch processing, generates documents, sends emails ect. everything excel can't or shouldn't do. This stack could solve, in my opinion, >50% of all business software. I have also considered some sort of general data storage but it's too slow. Drop box et al are not made for anything close to real time communication, which is critical for a spreadsheet that needs to talk to a program. Something like 100ms at most. This would also presumably require a perfect .xlsx implementation to read and edit the data which doesn't exist to my knowledge.
  - rblatz 4y ago
    Google sheets, maybe excel, can make http post and get requests. It’s trivial to write an api that can read/write to a database on behalf of the spreadsheet.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    You wrote: <<Critically you cannot edit the database itself, only copy from it.>> I'm confused. I have written Excel workbooks that write (insert/update/delete) to a database using VBA w/ ODBC.
    - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
      That sounds interesting. Would you be willing to post the VBA code?
WalterBright 4y ago
Sometimes I'll write a D program when I really should just use sed :-)

eternityforest 4y ago

The trouble with that is it's a central server which means an IT department to fuss with it. Better would be something like Excel but that works P2P like SyncThing, or even directly using SyncThing itself. I don't think it would actually be too hard as long as you didn't need truly realtime collaboration if you used file sync as your backend, and gave up on the 2D sheet model in favor of a table/records model that lends itself to conflict free operations instead of edits to specific numbered cells.

accountinhn 4y ago

Excel can connect to postgres - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2T7xdNZ3Qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2T7xdNZ3Qc That combined with some thing like Office365 or Dropbox type service and we have what you might be describing.

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
I am well aware of ODBC. Critically you cannot edit the database itself, only copy from it. This makes sense so as not to let some sales guy tank an entire company becuase he misspelled a formula. What I mean is a spreadsheet that literally runs on a database. It could even be sqlite, _anything_ that allows two way communication between the slreadsheet and the application. spreadsheet gui <--> database <--> application The spreadsheet does simple data manipulation and acts as a GUI The database can be mysql, postgres, sqlite (even JSON...) The application does batch processing, generates documents, sends emails ect. everything excel can't or shouldn't do. This stack could solve, in my opinion, >50% of all business software. I have also considered some sort of general data storage but it's too slow. Drop box et al are not made for anything close to real time communication, which is critical for a spreadsheet that needs to talk to a program. Something like 100ms at most. This would also presumably require a perfect .xlsx implementation to read and edit the data which doesn't exist to my knowledge.
- rblatz 4y ago
  Google sheets, maybe excel, can make http post and get requests. It’s trivial to write an api that can read/write to a database on behalf of the spreadsheet.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  You wrote: <<Critically you cannot edit the database itself, only copy from it.>> I'm confused. I have written Excel workbooks that write (insert/update/delete) to a database using VBA w/ ODBC.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
    That sounds interesting. Would you be willing to post the VBA code?

WalterBright 4y ago

Sometimes I'll write a D program when I really should just use sed :-)