7 ms·

Ask PG: Is this what you meant by "web-based Excel/database hybrid"?

75 points by sheetjs 13y ago

executive 13y ago
doubtful, the site is pathetically slow.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  I'm glad the site is still up. The last demo was hosted on Github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722197 https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs.github.io https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs.github.io ... and we managed to kill github pages: https://status.github.com/messages/2013-11-13 https://status.github.com/messages/2013-11-13 So I'm very happy that the hosting hasn't died yet
jezell 13y ago
No.
ealexhudson 13y ago
I think he probably meant something closer to DabbleDB, which shut down a couple of years ago :( Still a great idea.
- j45 13y ago
  Dabble DB was amazing. I only discovered it a week before it was aqui-shutdown. Edit: I'm trying to access the demo video on archive.org and was able to get into the help area for anyone interested in the details of how it worked: http://web.archive.org/web/20090430200143/http://dabbledb.com/help/index http://web.archive.org/web/20090430200143/http://dabbledb.co...
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Here is a video on Youtube. I don't know if it is the one you were looking for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY
catshirt 13y ago
surely not? this is like google docs with no design or features.
- hencq 13y ago
  And note that Google Sheets actually has a query() function that allows you to run SQL like queries on your datasets. Few people seem to know this, but for me it's one of the features where I prefer it to Excel.
  - yahelc 13y ago
    I didn't, that's really useful! Sharing the documentation links for the benefit of others, since it's not easily found: Documentation for the query() function: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3093343 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3093343 Query Language Reference: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/queryla...
  - arethuza 13y ago
    You can run queries over data in Excel from inside Excel - using the Get External Data option then selecting the spreadsheet you are working on as the source. However, while investigating this I found that Excel gets quite upset if you import the data from your query into the same location as the source...... :-)
cdcarter 13y ago
Unlikely. This still requires you to create all your data offline. Likely what pg is referring to (because I know I and many others wish they had it) is an easy to use browser based MS Access replacement that actually works, and also can quickly report out to a web-based MS Excel replacement so that you can build formulas they way you're used to, not learn SQL. Something like DabbleDB.
svmegatron 13y ago
I'll be the Pollyanna here and say: maybe! Probably not this iteration, but maybe! Features I'd suggest: * Some explanation, in a big font, of what we are seeing on the homepage of sheetjs.com ("SheetJS lets you get more information out of your data, instantly") * A big button that takes me to a sample sheet, with some sample queries I can run. Basically, a live tutorial Good luck, this looks cool!
dllthomas 13y ago
I want a vim/excel/database (and sed/excel/database) hybrid more than I want a web based one. I've no trouble accepting that I'm weird, though...
jellicle 13y ago
I don't know what pg meant, but I know what I'm still looking for: Microsoft Access, available in a cross-platform online way. And no, things like Openoffice^W Libreoffice Base or Kexi are about 1,000,000 miles away from even being useable, much less good.
- ajcarpy2005 13y ago
  Doesn't Salesforce have 'sort of' similar software in the Cloud?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- sheetjs 13y ago
  > And no, things like Openoffice^W Libreoffice Base or Kexi are about 1,000,000 miles away from even being useable, much less good. ... which is why we started from the problem of document compatibility (something I really wish GDocs and Numbers for iOS focused on). In the process of building and discovering test cases (repo: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files) we found and reported bugs in OO, Apache POI, roo, xlrd and other parsers https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls and https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx are the parsers underlying this.
- eterm 13y ago
  Despite the fact I've long moved on from MS Access, I know exactly what you mean. There needs to be an application that anyone can open up and start doing database stuff with, that is cross platform but accessible to both end users who want to explore through clicks (query builders) but also those who want the power to script it (SQL and VBA). Access really delivered on that count. If it wasn't for the two factors of relatively poor performance (terrible performance when run "across" a network) and lack of cross-platform behaviour, it would be my go-to tool. I think there really is demand for a cross platform database gui that sits on top of a serverless database file. If this file can be uploaded to a website that also enables excel-like data manipulation and then downloaded/shared back as a file for manipulation by this gui tool then even better. If this tool is powerful enough to realise that it shouldn't try to execute across a network and somehow flip over to a "remote execution" mode where it targets a server rather than a file, then even better. That's the dream, nothing has ever come close. Opening an MDB across a network share. Opening large databases for long running simulations was par for the course at a company where I previously worked. One of the first things I did was make sure files were on a local drive before simulating which turned a 6 hour run into a minute long run.
zefi 13y ago
Fivetran is probably the closest to it. They're also YC (W13) which makes sense. https://www.fivetran.com/ https://www.fivetran.com/
pkh80 13y ago
I think what you want is something like Microsoft Access on the web, only less crappy. I think its been tried many times and never done quite right.
notastartup 13y ago
what was the original statement made by PG? so if anyone can help me understand what PG meant and what it is that people would like to see with the "modern" Access/Excel version, I might be able to create a quick prototype and get your feedbacks. Please email me and I'd love to send you an alpha version. Basically, I'm missing what MS Access was like as I've never encountered it in my career path as a developer. If I could learn what made MS Access so lovable (or unlikable) as a pillar to shape the prototype from what I understand will need cross-platform, local, optional cloud upload (I totally get that you wouldn't want to upload your company's sensitive spreadsheet), and some of the basic functionality of a database management tool that are commonly used.
- byoung2 13y ago
  http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping. Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)
pg 13y ago
As far as I can tell from a quick look, this isn't what I had in mind. I'd expect to see a grid I could start typing into, not a page of text. I was thinking of something for ordinary end users. So anything that tells users "This particular parser assumes that the first row of every table is a header row" is ipso facto not what I had in mind, because ordinary end users don't know what a parser is. Or a header row for that matter.
- cmbaus 13y ago
  During the PC boom in the 90s many of the hot products were productivity apps that allowed non-programmers to do "computing" (for lack of a better term). - Access/dBase/Filemaker - Word/WordPerfect - Excel/Lotus - Photoshop - Harvard Graphics (if anyone remembers that one) - Pagemaker - Corel Draw/Illustrator These were the types of apps that many young programmers, myself included, wanted to work on. After the internet happened effort moved away from productivity apps, and towards communication apps. That's where all the hyper growth was, so that's understandable. In the meantime, not much has really changed with productivity apps. The big apps from 90s are still the big apps of today. But as browsers have improved significantly in the past couple years, I think there is going to be a resurgence in web based productivity apps. Webflow is a good example. They are basically building a traditional style productivity app in the browser.
  - rartichoke 13y ago
    I think the problem with web versions of excel-like apps is the lack of trust when it comes to hosting your private information on the sites that would run them. Do you really want to have your expense/profit reports, customer lists, etc. hosted on some app? I don't even use Google spreadsheet because of this sole reason and I don't plan to switch. I would like to switch but yeah, I just don't trust private financial data in the hands of any service provider.
    - krrrh 13y ago
      This is a good point. Beyond the privacy concerns, there's the problem of not having any control over when the software disappears. One of the better general purpose web-based productivity apps was DabbleDB. I got a friend hooked on it and he invested a bunch of time basing many of his companies internal processes on it. They were subsequently acquired by Twitter and shut down the service.
waterside81 13y ago
The idea of a "modern" Excel/Access is intriguing, but it's not without it's pitfalls. Basically, who uses Excel/Access a lot? Big Corporate America. Can they put their data up anywhere and access it over the web? In some cases, yes, in most cases I've seen, no. So any solution, to really make a dent, has to be usable as a self-hosted app. No quant at a trading desk is going to willy-nilly upload their proprietary models to a startup running on EC2. We encountered this push back with our software so we had to write an Excel add-in (code-signed, of course) for our corporate customers so they could use our software locally on their data sets without having to leave the comfy confines of their corporate firewall. With all that said, I'm sure there is some segment of the population who don't mind their data up in the cloud if the UI on top comes close to Access. You just gotta find that segment.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  One advantage of an in-browser tool is that the hosting can be anywhere, from the cloud to your local computer. I set up a simple nodejs server (using the module `j` http://npm.im/j http://npm.im/j) that exposes all of the XLSB files in a directory on a computer and generates Numbers-compatible CSV output so I can read the data on iPhone when I need to. The data is hosted locally, and unlike with saving CSVs the output is always up to date
- qq66 13y ago
  What's your product called?
  - waterside81 13y ago
    https://www.repustate.com/sentiment-analysis-excel-plugin/ https://www.repustate.com/sentiment-analysis-excel-plugin/
    - notastartup 13y ago
      whoa that is seriously awesome tool! how do you build such excel plugins? have you also thought about listing it on the microsoft office store?
pbreit 13y ago
I was always wondering if FileMaker could find some sort of role like this (if it's even still alive)?
- desigooner 13y ago
  It's still very much alive. IIRC, a lot of universities / K-12 schools and non profits use FileMaker in some manner. I've supported a high number of users in the past and non-technical people surprisingly adapted well managing to be productive with it. The iPhone + iPad apps were decently usable upon launch and hopefully they've gotten better over the last couple of years. I prefer FM over Access and even Excel as far as small tasks like data matching / cleanup / etc. are concerned where a development effort isn't warranted.
dfc 13y ago
Tiling window manager users: What do you do when you see "drop a file here"? I usually just move on but I wanted to try this. I am staring at awesome right now trying to think-of/find a graphical file manager that does not have a thousand dependencies.
- h3st 13y ago
  If few dependencies are your thing, you could try rox? http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer My package manager tells me it depends on sh, libsm and gtk2. That's not much.
  - dfc 13y ago
    I actually used to use roxterm3. When I mentioned dependencies I should have said "does not depend on kde-base|gnome-core|xfce.
- mintplant 13y ago
  I split my screen between `nautilus` and `firefox` and drop the file from one to the other. What aspect particular to tiling window managers gives you difficulty?
  - dfc 13y ago
    Awesome/Xmonad/i3 do not come with a GUI file manager (for obvious reasons). I don't have gnome/kde/xfce installed and point and click file management is not going to be the straw that broke the camels back. The only thing that comes close is rkward, but it relies on kde-base which is the most obese of the three big environments.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
taylorbuley 13y ago
I'm a huge proponent of IndexedDB, so I groan every time I see a new app developed using WebSQL. From the WebSQL spec: > Beware. This specification is no longer in active maintenance and the Web Applications Working Group does not intend to maintain it further. WebSQL isn't going anywhere, and it's the only good client-side database on iOS, but without IE support and a spec-based future I'm not sure why folks continue to put good development time into this API.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  There is a version using SQLite (compiled to JS using emscripten): http://sheetjs.com/sexql/sqljs.html http://sheetjs.com/sexql/sqljs.html However, the source is about 2MB, so I thought it was preferable to use WebSQL on iPhone (and fall back to SQL.js when necessary)
spullara 13y ago
SmartSheet is pretty much an excel/database hybrid and is pretty popular.
rogerbinns 13y ago
Why can't I use a csv file? The thing that is most valuable for exploring data for us is pivot tables. Both Excel and LibreOffice are single threaded and take forever once you have a few hundred thousand rows.
- luckydata 13y ago
  you should add yourself to the list at www.datapad.io and then get in touch on twitter using @luckymethod
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
SushiMon 13y ago
You mean something like www.silk.co? Full disclosure - I work there. It turns CSVs into a web-based CSV/DB hybrid. Row = page. Column header = key. Column content = value. Collection = Worksheet. You can link worksheets and pivot the views. Also has basic visualizations - pie, line, bar, table, grid maps.
iandanforth 13y ago
I think this is a really cool tool! I'd love to be able to select columns/rows in the results so I can copy/paste them elsewhere.
TheBigOh 13y ago
This is slightly off the mark as you can't edit data with this tool, but this past year I worked on building a tool for manipulating data from an rdbms in the browser using only clicks. It was an effort to get beyond traditional enterprise reporting frameworks, but more importantly it was my "learn Clojure by building something kinda useful" project. I have it hosted on Heroku here: http://efreportsdemo.herokuapp.com/ http://efreportsdemo.herokuapp.com/ Since I mostly use this project for resume fodder, it only uses one dyno and could probably stand to be a bit more secure (my postgres db should probably be a "follower"). Tangentially, it really wouldn't be very difficult to get this to support multiple datasources - some even csv file based.
ams6110 13y ago
So I can use this to work with an Excel file that I already have on my computer. Why would I not just open that file in Excel?

75 points by sheetjs 13y ago

executive 13y ago

doubtful, the site is pathetically slow.

sheetjs 13y ago
I'm glad the site is still up. The last demo was hosted on Github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722197 https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs.github.io https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs.github.io ... and we managed to kill github pages: https://status.github.com/messages/2013-11-13 https://status.github.com/messages/2013-11-13 So I'm very happy that the hosting hasn't died yet

jezell 13y ago

No.

ealexhudson 13y ago

I think he probably meant something closer to DabbleDB, which shut down a couple of years ago :( Still a great idea.

j45 13y ago
Dabble DB was amazing. I only discovered it a week before it was aqui-shutdown. Edit: I'm trying to access the demo video on archive.org and was able to get into the help area for anyone interested in the details of how it worked: http://web.archive.org/web/20090430200143/http://dabbledb.com/help/index http://web.archive.org/web/20090430200143/http://dabbledb.co...
- rpedela 13y ago
  Here is a video on Youtube. I don't know if it is the one you were looking for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY

catshirt 13y ago

surely not? this is like google docs with no design or features.

hencq 13y ago
And note that Google Sheets actually has a query() function that allows you to run SQL like queries on your datasets. Few people seem to know this, but for me it's one of the features where I prefer it to Excel.
- yahelc 13y ago
  I didn't, that's really useful! Sharing the documentation links for the benefit of others, since it's not easily found: Documentation for the query() function: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3093343 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3093343 Query Language Reference: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/queryla...
- arethuza 13y ago
  You can run queries over data in Excel from inside Excel - using the Get External Data option then selecting the spreadsheet you are working on as the source. However, while investigating this I found that Excel gets quite upset if you import the data from your query into the same location as the source...... :-)

cdcarter 13y ago

Unlikely. This still requires you to create all your data offline. Likely what pg is referring to (because I know I and many others wish they had it) is an easy to use browser based MS Access replacement that actually works, and also can quickly report out to a web-based MS Excel replacement so that you can build formulas they way you're used to, not learn SQL. Something like DabbleDB.

svmegatron 13y ago

I'll be the Pollyanna here and say: maybe! Probably not this iteration, but maybe! Features I'd suggest: * Some explanation, in a big font, of what we are seeing on the homepage of sheetjs.com ("SheetJS lets you get more information out of your data, instantly") * A big button that takes me to a sample sheet, with some sample queries I can run. Basically, a live tutorial Good luck, this looks cool!

dllthomas 13y ago

I want a vim/excel/database (and sed/excel/database) hybrid more than I want a web based one. I've no trouble accepting that I'm weird, though...

jellicle 13y ago

I don't know what pg meant, but I know what I'm still looking for: Microsoft Access, available in a cross-platform online way. And no, things like Openoffice^W Libreoffice Base or Kexi are about 1,000,000 miles away from even being useable, much less good.

ajcarpy2005 13y ago
Doesn't Salesforce have 'sort of' similar software in the Cloud?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
sheetjs 13y ago
> And no, things like Openoffice^W Libreoffice Base or Kexi are about 1,000,000 miles away from even being useable, much less good. ... which is why we started from the problem of document compatibility (something I really wish GDocs and Numbers for iOS focused on). In the process of building and discovering test cases (repo: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files) we found and reported bugs in OO, Apache POI, roo, xlrd and other parsers https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls and https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx are the parsers underlying this.
eterm 13y ago
Despite the fact I've long moved on from MS Access, I know exactly what you mean. There needs to be an application that anyone can open up and start doing database stuff with, that is cross platform but accessible to both end users who want to explore through clicks (query builders) but also those who want the power to script it (SQL and VBA). Access really delivered on that count. If it wasn't for the two factors of relatively poor performance (terrible performance when run "across" a network) and lack of cross-platform behaviour, it would be my go-to tool. I think there really is demand for a cross platform database gui that sits on top of a serverless database file. If this file can be uploaded to a website that also enables excel-like data manipulation and then downloaded/shared back as a file for manipulation by this gui tool then even better. If this tool is powerful enough to realise that it shouldn't try to execute across a network and somehow flip over to a "remote execution" mode where it targets a server rather than a file, then even better. That's the dream, nothing has ever come close. Opening an MDB across a network share. Opening large databases for long running simulations was par for the course at a company where I previously worked. One of the first things I did was make sure files were on a local drive before simulating which turned a 6 hour run into a minute long run.

zefi 13y ago

Fivetran is probably the closest to it. They're also YC (W13) which makes sense. https://www.fivetran.com/ https://www.fivetran.com/

pkh80 13y ago

I think what you want is something like Microsoft Access on the web, only less crappy. I think its been tried many times and never done quite right.

notastartup 13y ago

what was the original statement made by PG? so if anyone can help me understand what PG meant and what it is that people would like to see with the "modern" Access/Excel version, I might be able to create a quick prototype and get your feedbacks. Please email me and I'd love to send you an alpha version. Basically, I'm missing what MS Access was like as I've never encountered it in my career path as a developer. If I could learn what made MS Access so lovable (or unlikable) as a pillar to shape the prototype from what I understand will need cross-platform, local, optional cloud upload (I totally get that you wouldn't want to upload your company's sensitive spreadsheet), and some of the basic functionality of a database management tool that are commonly used.

byoung2 13y ago
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping. Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)

pg 13y ago

As far as I can tell from a quick look, this isn't what I had in mind. I'd expect to see a grid I could start typing into, not a page of text. I was thinking of something for ordinary end users. So anything that tells users "This particular parser assumes that the first row of every table is a header row" is ipso facto not what I had in mind, because ordinary end users don't know what a parser is. Or a header row for that matter.

cmbaus 13y ago
During the PC boom in the 90s many of the hot products were productivity apps that allowed non-programmers to do "computing" (for lack of a better term). - Access/dBase/Filemaker - Word/WordPerfect - Excel/Lotus - Photoshop - Harvard Graphics (if anyone remembers that one) - Pagemaker - Corel Draw/Illustrator These were the types of apps that many young programmers, myself included, wanted to work on. After the internet happened effort moved away from productivity apps, and towards communication apps. That's where all the hyper growth was, so that's understandable. In the meantime, not much has really changed with productivity apps. The big apps from 90s are still the big apps of today. But as browsers have improved significantly in the past couple years, I think there is going to be a resurgence in web based productivity apps. Webflow is a good example. They are basically building a traditional style productivity app in the browser.
- rartichoke 13y ago
  I think the problem with web versions of excel-like apps is the lack of trust when it comes to hosting your private information on the sites that would run them. Do you really want to have your expense/profit reports, customer lists, etc. hosted on some app? I don't even use Google spreadsheet because of this sole reason and I don't plan to switch. I would like to switch but yeah, I just don't trust private financial data in the hands of any service provider.
  - krrrh 13y ago
    This is a good point. Beyond the privacy concerns, there's the problem of not having any control over when the software disappears. One of the better general purpose web-based productivity apps was DabbleDB. I got a friend hooked on it and he invested a bunch of time basing many of his companies internal processes on it. They were subsequently acquired by Twitter and shut down the service.

waterside81 13y ago

The idea of a "modern" Excel/Access is intriguing, but it's not without it's pitfalls. Basically, who uses Excel/Access a lot? Big Corporate America. Can they put their data up anywhere and access it over the web? In some cases, yes, in most cases I've seen, no. So any solution, to really make a dent, has to be usable as a self-hosted app. No quant at a trading desk is going to willy-nilly upload their proprietary models to a startup running on EC2. We encountered this push back with our software so we had to write an Excel add-in (code-signed, of course) for our corporate customers so they could use our software locally on their data sets without having to leave the comfy confines of their corporate firewall. With all that said, I'm sure there is some segment of the population who don't mind their data up in the cloud if the UI on top comes close to Access. You just gotta find that segment.

sheetjs 13y ago
One advantage of an in-browser tool is that the hosting can be anywhere, from the cloud to your local computer. I set up a simple nodejs server (using the module `j` http://npm.im/j http://npm.im/j) that exposes all of the XLSB files in a directory on a computer and generates Numbers-compatible CSV output so I can read the data on iPhone when I need to. The data is hosted locally, and unlike with saving CSVs the output is always up to date
qq66 13y ago
What's your product called?
- waterside81 13y ago
  https://www.repustate.com/sentiment-analysis-excel-plugin/ https://www.repustate.com/sentiment-analysis-excel-plugin/
  - notastartup 13y ago
    whoa that is seriously awesome tool! how do you build such excel plugins? have you also thought about listing it on the microsoft office store?

pbreit 13y ago

I was always wondering if FileMaker could find some sort of role like this (if it's even still alive)?

desigooner 13y ago
It's still very much alive. IIRC, a lot of universities / K-12 schools and non profits use FileMaker in some manner. I've supported a high number of users in the past and non-technical people surprisingly adapted well managing to be productive with it. The iPhone + iPad apps were decently usable upon launch and hopefully they've gotten better over the last couple of years. I prefer FM over Access and even Excel as far as small tasks like data matching / cleanup / etc. are concerned where a development effort isn't warranted.

dfc 13y ago

Tiling window manager users: What do you do when you see "drop a file here"? I usually just move on but I wanted to try this. I am staring at awesome right now trying to think-of/find a graphical file manager that does not have a thousand dependencies.

h3st 13y ago
If few dependencies are your thing, you could try rox? http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer My package manager tells me it depends on sh, libsm and gtk2. That's not much.
- dfc 13y ago
  I actually used to use roxterm3. When I mentioned dependencies I should have said "does not depend on kde-base|gnome-core|xfce.
mintplant 13y ago
I split my screen between `nautilus` and `firefox` and drop the file from one to the other. What aspect particular to tiling window managers gives you difficulty?
- dfc 13y ago
  Awesome/Xmonad/i3 do not come with a GUI file manager (for obvious reasons). I don't have gnome/kde/xfce installed and point and click file management is not going to be the straw that broke the camels back. The only thing that comes close is rkward, but it relies on kde-base which is the most obese of the three big environments.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

taylorbuley 13y ago

I'm a huge proponent of IndexedDB, so I groan every time I see a new app developed using WebSQL. From the WebSQL spec: > Beware. This specification is no longer in active maintenance and the Web Applications Working Group does not intend to maintain it further. WebSQL isn't going anywhere, and it's the only good client-side database on iOS, but without IE support and a spec-based future I'm not sure why folks continue to put good development time into this API.

sheetjs 13y ago
There is a version using SQLite (compiled to JS using emscripten): http://sheetjs.com/sexql/sqljs.html http://sheetjs.com/sexql/sqljs.html However, the source is about 2MB, so I thought it was preferable to use WebSQL on iPhone (and fall back to SQL.js when necessary)

spullara 13y ago

SmartSheet is pretty much an excel/database hybrid and is pretty popular.

rogerbinns 13y ago

Why can't I use a csv file? The thing that is most valuable for exploring data for us is pivot tables. Both Excel and LibreOffice are single threaded and take forever once you have a few hundred thousand rows.

luckydata 13y ago
you should add yourself to the list at www.datapad.io and then get in touch on twitter using @luckymethod

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

SushiMon 13y ago

You mean something like www.silk.co? Full disclosure - I work there. It turns CSVs into a web-based CSV/DB hybrid. Row = page. Column header = key. Column content = value. Collection = Worksheet. You can link worksheets and pivot the views. Also has basic visualizations - pie, line, bar, table, grid maps.

iandanforth 13y ago

I think this is a really cool tool! I'd love to be able to select columns/rows in the results so I can copy/paste them elsewhere.

TheBigOh 13y ago

This is slightly off the mark as you can't edit data with this tool, but this past year I worked on building a tool for manipulating data from an rdbms in the browser using only clicks. It was an effort to get beyond traditional enterprise reporting frameworks, but more importantly it was my "learn Clojure by building something kinda useful" project. I have it hosted on Heroku here: http://efreportsdemo.herokuapp.com/ http://efreportsdemo.herokuapp.com/ Since I mostly use this project for resume fodder, it only uses one dyno and could probably stand to be a bit more secure (my postgres db should probably be a "follower"). Tangentially, it really wouldn't be very difficult to get this to support multiple datasources - some even csv file based.

ams6110 13y ago

So I can use this to work with an Excel file that I already have on my computer. Why would I not just open that file in Excel?