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Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

NOTE: this is NOT a troll.

I know a great tool for the job.

It works fine with source control and allows documents to be diffed and merged.

The editor is 100% offline as is the product or it can be 100% online at will. No need to push changes to server - just replicate/copy. If you fancy collaboration tools you can use use extensive ones on a subscription basis.

It's got a well documented SDK and an interface that you can call.

Documentation is wonderful.

Automation can be done with PowerShell, VB.Net, C#, Python, Ruby, VBScript, JScript/JavaScript, Java or even Common Lisp if it takes your fancy.

Seriously just use Excel - it's just what you've asked for.

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I don't think you're trolling; Excel is certainly an option.

But for two things:

  Excel for Mac - $129 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YCOJBC)
  Excel for Win - $121 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0039L2XG6)

And you need a Windows box or Mac with Excel installed. I personally have access to dozens of machines, literally none of which have Excel. All of them have a web browser, and thus access to Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps Script for free. To me, and many others, that makes all the difference in the world.

That's not a major issue.:

You can use Office 2010 web apps FREE from a SkyDrive account and openly collaborate with people or you can pay $20 a month per seat for Office 365 and you will get Sharepoint and ALL Office 2010 desktop apps.

The office web apps work perfectly in all browsers (I've tried Chrome, Firefox and IE).

Considering the cost of playing around with Google spreadsheet with those restrictions, it's possibly a good idea.

Does the Excel web app support VBA? I was under the impression that the 365 apps offer a subset of the functionality of their desktop counterparts.

They don't support VBA directly.

I've always used Excel to publish result data to a spreadsheet rather than the entire thing. Data collection is done using InfoPath so you get the following workflow:

[www:InfoPath Office 365] -> [dt:Excel]-> [www:Excel report on Office 365]

It depends on your use case. I'd be tempted to use a sharepoint list with a custom report for anything more complicated.

How come Excel works fine with source control? It is a binary blob and diff and merge are done with Excel itself, not the version control's merge and diff (which may or may not be what you want).

What are those collaboration tools for Excel? This is an honest question: all I see is some spreadsheet on shared drive or Sharepoint with some ad hoc process around editing, making sure the need for the merge is avoided.

Excel files are simply zip files with XML in them.

What version control system will let you see the changes between the contents of two zip files again?

With Git and Svn you can specify the diff to use, so you can use something like oodiff if you are versioning OpenOffice files.

Something to diff zips of xml almost certainly exists and could be used in the same manner.

Now, patch is another thing ...

TortoiseSVN will diff OO and MS Office files out of the box.

But seriously, you're kidding right? Here's microsoft's answer to the diff and merge question: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-...

Granted, excel is a powerful tool for an individual to work with, but for teams working with a large number of complex sheets the model breaks down quickly. Keeping up with changes and versions using excel is a nightmare.

That's what Sharepoint is for :)

Also Word/Excel 2010 have excellent change management tools which integrate nicely with mercurial and SVN built in (under review changes).

You have to frig a couple of command line switches to get it to work but TortoiseSVN has those preconfigured.

EDIT: answers.microsoft.com is full of trash - ignore it...

Just tried it - AMAZING!

http://www.ipreferjim.com/2010/11/tip-for-writers-and-noveli...

Indeed.

We have 400+ page documents in the system and they all work nicely :)

You are right, it's something I forgot to mention: we are Google Apps users. We love that product: gmail, docs, spreadsheets, now drive... our whole business is based on Apps and our own ticketing/crm/sales software.

And I don't even use Excel, I run linux, although I've used Excel a lot and I think it's awesome at what it does.

I didn't find your reply as trollish, you certainly do make a very valid point.

WRT to Linux, all the Office web apps work on Linux quite happily.

We tend to give senior people access to windows machines with Office 2010 Professional Plus on and relegate support staff to Linux machines with Office web apps (in Chrome).

Can you elaborate on Common Lisp automation...

Via COM. Technically any language with a COM or DCOM bridge will work fine. lispworks has one and there is a route via the CLR here:

http://weitz.de/rdnzl/

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