3 ms·

And at the pinnacle of the "perfect synergy" will be the C-levels and execs saying "This <industry specific iOS app> is awesome for my world wide safesforce! No

And at the pinnacle of the "perfect synergy" will be the C-levels and execs saying "This <industry specific iOS app> is awesome for my world wide safesforce! Now how do I export all the data to Excel?" This initiative probably has the MS Office 365 marketing people salivating.

r00fus 12y ago
It's quite easy to export moderately sized data sets to xlsx. The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with). Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.
- mistermann 12y ago
  Some of the capabilities they have now with PowerView/PowerPivot/Hadoop are technically impressive. http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoop-to-cloud-with-hdinsight/ http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoo...
threeseed 12y ago
Numbers (Apple's spreadsheeting software) is with the exception of macros fully compatible with Excel. And like Office 365 is also online.
- Mister_Snuggles 12y ago
  Not quite. Macros are probably the biggest thing that's missing, but there are others. Some documents that I've prepared in Excel with complex (meaning not all that complex) don't come into Numbers properly (a stacked bar with one series as a line, for example).
- yardie 12y ago
  I'm a daily users of Numbers and I can say unequivocally it is not quite close enough. They get 90-95% percent of it right. It's that last 5% that always give me headaches when I export an xlsx. It's not just the macros but 100s of little things that break compatibility. If you use Numbers with Excel for anything but the most basic spreadsheet list you are going to have a bad time.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Transition from Excel to "something else" merely has to be not much worse than transition from Excel 20?? to Excel 20??. Or even if it is worse, be worth the pain. Its something of a stereotype but generally Excel to "something else" is less painful than old Excel to new Excel.

r00fus 12y ago

It's quite easy to export moderately sized data sets to xlsx. The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with). Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.

mistermann 12y ago
Some of the capabilities they have now with PowerView/PowerPivot/Hadoop are technically impressive. http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoop-to-cloud-with-hdinsight/ http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoo...

threeseed 12y ago

Numbers (Apple's spreadsheeting software) is with the exception of macros fully compatible with Excel. And like Office 365 is also online.

Mister_Snuggles 12y ago
Not quite. Macros are probably the biggest thing that's missing, but there are others. Some documents that I've prepared in Excel with complex (meaning not all that complex) don't come into Numbers properly (a stacked bar with one series as a line, for example).
yardie 12y ago
I'm a daily users of Numbers and I can say unequivocally it is not quite close enough. They get 90-95% percent of it right. It's that last 5% that always give me headaches when I export an xlsx. It's not just the macros but 100s of little things that break compatibility. If you use Numbers with Excel for anything but the most basic spreadsheet list you are going to have a bad time.
- VLM 12y ago
  Transition from Excel to "something else" merely has to be not much worse than transition from Excel 20?? to Excel 20??. Or even if it is worse, be worth the pain. Its something of a stereotype but generally Excel to "something else" is less painful than old Excel to new Excel.