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Imagine Excel with a complete audit trail of all keystrokes and spreadsheet interactions. Quite a few problems would be solved.

intended 14y ago
Many firms have absolutely gargantuan spreadsheets and workbooks. I suspect that individual files would become humongous with those features added.
- michaelfeathers 14y ago
  If you store the commands from the beginning, you can recreate the state at any point in time. Space gets cheaper every day.
  - intended 14y ago
    The idea does have merit. On the average case it should be able to work. A few things may be an issue with implementation, one of which would be excel macros. As it stands excel undo cannot regress past the last use of a macro. I suspect a state list may encounter a similar roadblock. As it stands excel can be very very slow on large sets of data. On a sufficiently complex and clean model, I've seen load times and computer slow downs which begin to make Tokyo traffic seem mild, if it doesn't just hang.
Leynos 14y ago
As I understand it, Hypernumbers (the cloud spreadsheet) offers this.
konstruktor 14y ago
This would make it easier to blame the person who "made the mistake" of mistyping something in a spreadsheet that is error-prone by nature and used in a process without QA. Exactly what problem would that solve?
- michaelfeathers 14y ago
  It's a foot in the door toward QA and detection of common mistakes.
codeulike 14y ago
Google docs spreadsheets _almost_ have that - it keeps a history but its hard to do a diff with previous versions
- binxbolling 14y ago
  It doesn't keep nearly enough history for even basic usage.
  - lallysingh 14y ago
    You have to click the "Show more detailed revisions" button.
    - binxbolling 14y ago
      Still does not prevent revision pruning. For personal use, this is very rarely a problem. For anybody with Google Apps for Education or Business, it's a pretty frequent issue with (AFAIK) no real or good solution: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95902 https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95902

intended 14y ago

Many firms have absolutely gargantuan spreadsheets and workbooks. I suspect that individual files would become humongous with those features added.

michaelfeathers 14y ago
If you store the commands from the beginning, you can recreate the state at any point in time. Space gets cheaper every day.
- intended 14y ago
  The idea does have merit. On the average case it should be able to work. A few things may be an issue with implementation, one of which would be excel macros. As it stands excel undo cannot regress past the last use of a macro. I suspect a state list may encounter a similar roadblock. As it stands excel can be very very slow on large sets of data. On a sufficiently complex and clean model, I've seen load times and computer slow downs which begin to make Tokyo traffic seem mild, if it doesn't just hang.

Leynos 14y ago

As I understand it, Hypernumbers (the cloud spreadsheet) offers this.

konstruktor 14y ago

This would make it easier to blame the person who "made the mistake" of mistyping something in a spreadsheet that is error-prone by nature and used in a process without QA. Exactly what problem would that solve?

michaelfeathers 14y ago
It's a foot in the door toward QA and detection of common mistakes.

codeulike 14y ago

Google docs spreadsheets _almost_ have that - it keeps a history but its hard to do a diff with previous versions

binxbolling 14y ago
It doesn't keep nearly enough history for even basic usage.
- lallysingh 14y ago
  You have to click the "Show more detailed revisions" button.
  - binxbolling 14y ago
    Still does not prevent revision pruning. For personal use, this is very rarely a problem. For anybody with Google Apps for Education or Business, it's a pretty frequent issue with (AFAIK) no real or good solution: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95902 https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95902