A blog reader introduced me to a new blog by a guy named Phil Jones. Among other great things, he has this amazing post about Microsoft, and their future. Basically, he argues that in the era of Web 2.0, the only really compelling platform they have is Excel. Read this post, it’s dead on.
I’ve always loved Excel (and, since I don’t own a copy, I hobble along with Open Office‘s pale, pale substitute.) I’ve thought that it was truly one of the best pieces of software ever written. Really. And it’s amazing how much it can do, and how much an organization can do with it. There are plenty of very small organizations (and not so small) that run on Excel. Many shouldn’t, but, some, arguably, certainly can. And if the ideas he suggests for bringing Excel fully into the new age were actually done by Microsoft (fat chance) that would make it even better.
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I’m a rather modest user of Excel or OpenOffice.org’s Calc. Can you tell us some examples of how Excel is superior or more supple than Calc?
Thanks for the comment.
Actually, I don’t think that this is really just about Excel. Although MS reputedly put their best people on it. A lot of the goodness is inherent in the idea of a spreadsheet, right back to VisiCalc.
There’s no reason that OpenOffice Calc *couldn’t* take the lead and go past Excel, especially with the socialized functionality I was talking about.
I think one of the problems here is that people see spreadsheets as *just* one component of an office suite. So someone like Sun think that they need to give equal time to making their PowerPoint clone and their Access clone.
What I’d really like to see though is a true, enthusiastic Open Source community get behind a “better” spreadsheet for its own sake, not for the sake of copying Office.
Maybe WikiCalc is the way to go.
Scott: A combination of things. The graphing is hugely better (prettier, more flexible, more options). There are more functions, I believe (although I haven’t yet run into any that I need in OO that arent’ there.) More formatting options.
Phil: I agree – with time and effort, OO or any open source spreadsheet could out Excel Excel. And, since it is open source – I think that there are things that will arise that are not just imitations of Excel. I’ll have to check out wikicalc.
I’m pretty sure that WikiCalc[0] isn’t the way to go, though I’d like to see it take off a bit more than it has.
I don’t do much with graphing, but I end up using a lot of spreadsheets to calculate stuff.
Some things I wish OOo Calc did better?
* Dividing Cells: in excel, you can select a column and say “split this in to many columns using the comma as a delimiter” — I think it is under tools somewhere (I don’t have Excel so I don’t remember offhand.)
* Formulas: it is much, much more straightforward to compose compound functions in MS Excel.
* Opening whatever you throw at it: say “open”, find a file, and Excel will at least try to open it. OOo Calc will open your txt files in OOo Writer no matter what they contain.
* Macros are much more intuitive in whatever language Excel uses than in whatever it is that OOo Calc uses.
OOo Calc integrates really nicely with databases and stuff (I know that wasn’t too articulate, but I know what I know and not what I don’t. Feel free to make a technologically accurate version of that sentence.) but it won’t talk to mailmerge files.
Maybe I’m wrong about WikiCalc. I know it is awfully Web 1.0 of me, but what I really want is something powerful that just works locally.
I like sharing spreadsheets in a more wholesome and version controlled way, but having just utterly failed in my efforts to get a technological civilian to use a wiki, I might just be jaded[1]
We do need to start weening folks off of the email hammer to smash every problem, but I permission control, not functionality, is the tricky outlier on web-based shared spreadsheets.
Google is a little vague about the fact that when you invite someone to a spreadsheet they’ll need a Google Account. That gets super confusing when you (I) have a google account (Moraving) and don’t use it for anything (eg, mail sent to moraving@gmail.com will never get to me because I never look at it.), but inviting me by the email addy you know wont get me access to the spreadsheet you’re trying to share. Without getting into Google’s plan for world domination, what would help there is to see more universal adoption of OpenID[2].
[0] http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/wikicalc/
[1] Three offices, no sys-admin. The ED wants file sharing or VNC but won’t even try to use MediaWiki to maintain basic documents. The 16 year old intern, though, is totally game, so maybe it is just about time.
[2] http://openid.net/
Don’t ask how I found this again after all these years (searched for “moraving”) but It occurs to me that a lot of my gripes have been answered. Formulas are vastly improved, the “text-to-columns” function is there to split cells. You can open a text file, no problem. I haven’t tried to do anything with macros recently, so I can’t speak to that one.
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