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In a typical office environment, everybody knows how to work with spreadsheets. They're a common interface and a great way to present and explore tabular data.

But as soon as you put that data into an Excel document and hit Save, it's outdated. Somewhere, somebody in the office has a .xlsx file on their C: drive with the data you need, but that doesn't help you much, does it? Or somebody puts the data into a spreadsheet and emails it to everybody in the office, then a few people make some changes and email again, and now you've got 15 different versions of the same spreadsheet floating around and nobody knows which one is the latest and most truthful.

Or you put that interface on a web page connected to a shared data source and all of those problems disappear.

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Yes, I agree.

There's another nuanced advantage to this kind of tool, however: the ability to perform "reproducible" analysis.

With an excel spreadsheet, the person doing the analysis typically pulls in some data (usually by copy/paste), and then performs a series of manipulations on it. These manipulations are NOT recorded. A the end of the analysis the author sends the spreadsheet in an email or maybe copies the spreadsheet into the body of an email. Recipients, if they're going to evaluate the analysis have a lot of work to do over and aren't necessarily able to determine what, exactly, was done to the data.

Something like this puts everything into a console, javascript libraries, and tables-- as long as the author manipulates data from the console and the functions, it should be possible for someone to follow what was done to the data, reproduce results, and go further with the analysis.

Use of spreadsheets results into many problems when team-size sharing spreadsheet becomes bigger.

I have created summary of comparing spreadsheet with web application using online database at the following link. Major items are security, multi-user experience, encryption/decryption of sensitive data, auditing/change-history, workflow-requirements etc. For simple work in a smaller team environment spreadsheets work fine.

https://mydataorganizer.com/MyDataOrganizerBlog/Employees_HR...

I'm sorry, what?

What does this product have that fixes the problem you're talking about here? How does working in a spreadsheet with javascript net you any better benefit than working with Excel with respect to obsolete sheets?

Im afraid your experience of workflow is stuck in the 90s

Excel works just fine with dynamic data via SQL and Jason via URL.

You can also embed it as a runtime object in HTML.

My experience is stuck in the 90s, as are the coworkers that drive that experience. Most of them refer to the Chrome browser as "the Google", I haven't a snowball's chance in teaching them how to connect an Excel document directly to a central data source.

But what I can do is provide them with an easy interface for interacting with that data directly, and give them the option to "save" their results within the context of those interactions so that they can share a simple link instead of a static file.

As for embedding runtimes in HTML, ActiveX is dead and I do not mourn it. Our office has finally decided to standardize on a modern web browser, and I couldn't be happier about that.

Just because your place of work doesn't follow best practice doesn't mean it is not possible.

I didn't say it wasn't possible, but in my environment it is not as feasible as the alternative.

Creating a better solution is a lot easier than teaching everyone what a database is and why it's useful.

Colaborative spreadsheets using Javascript is not the answer

It's not your answer, and that's okay.

If you put this product in front of your office colleagues, how much traction would it get ?

But those people could be using Google Spreadsheet already for example, which would have already solved the problem. And people in the office are not going to be writing Javascript in their spreadsheet.

It literally solves nothing.

Storing proprietary data in Google may not be viable. I know it isn't in my office, for instance. Plus, you lose the flexibility to integrate it into a more comprehensive application interface which runs on your own hardware/software stack, which the Javascript in this case provides.

I can already imagine several good uses for this software in my workplace, so saying it "literally solves nothing" is "literally false".

Indeed, anyone who thinks Google Spreadsheets is the end of all spreadsheets and nobody would ever need anything else, has never tried to embed Google Spreadsheets into a larger application.

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