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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

In defence of Excel, imagine it didn't exist. Then somebody says:

"I've invented a program that allows non-programmers to input loosely-typed semi-structured data without needing to define a schema. It is automatically human-readable, and data can be simple code that can act on other data. It doesn't scale too well, but it can export to CSV and other standard data formats, allowing you to build real systems with it once the non-technical people have finished their logical prototyping."

People would be singing its praises and proclaiming the death of SQL for umpteenth time.

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Excel is good in some ways, not in all. We've always had this issue running reports on Excel instead of Oracle because it was much faster at that moment than waiting for IT to fix the bugs. Business processes aside, the results can be devastating once the data you wanted inside Oracle is still sitting on that Excel spreadsheet. Reports generated in Oracle become inaccurate, schedules get delayed, employees work late, everyone becomes miserable.

The one good thing why software and platforms are created is control. The only challenge is how can someone create a seamless web 2.0 spreadsheet almost similar to Google spreadsheets but definitely with more flexibility as Excel's and more security-enabled features like any other enterprise software.

Yes, I saw that startup idea below. If someone wants to do something about it, I'm in like Flynn.

How about Ragic? http://www.ragic.com

They're an online app for you to build a database like creating a spreadsheet form. And the created app is used just like a spreadsheet.

This pretty much mimics the spreadsheet behavior of:

1. Create a spreadsheet and put all the field names in it

2. Have other ppl fill out your form

But it has all kinds of functions of a database, like creating relations (named differently) and arbitrary complex, nested data schema.

Not only that, but I think a lot of people would be skeptical that your software could even do all those things. While Excel can be dangerous in the hand of the wrong user it is also pretty magical sometimes.

NoSQL with a GUI!!!1!1!!

and reactive programming

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