The notion of “business intelligence,” or easy access to critical company data, is one of the key areas for improvement that the company has identified for the next version of its flagship desktop software. On Monday, Microsoft shared some of its plans in that area, including the outlines of a new server-based system for managing Excel spreadsheets.
There’s no mention of whose company it is in the summary. This could be anyone’s office, if you’re not up to speed on current versions.
“Microsoft shared some of its plans in that area”
Unless it’s changed…
I believe it did change, unless I really read over it
Wow, I bet MS has lots of valuable patents on this new exciting technology…
Well, sometimes you start off with an Excel spreadsheet, keep using it over time, years pass by and now it’s huge. Encompassing more than just one spreadsheet, etc…
Just because people are using the spreadsheet to handle tons of data, which gets very clumbsy, doesn’t make them stupid.
If databases were as flexible as a spreadsheet in an ever changing business environment this might be valid. The truth is that for processes that are subject to change people use spread sheets. Databases are too inflexible.
an old saying goes – use a calculator, if its too complex write a program, there is never a need for spreadsheets, except for accountants.
i’ve seen people use excel as an animated presentation system (with sound), as a word-processing system, and as a desktop publhsing system.
So with a few more features, it could be emacs!
I even know a company that used to use Excel as the management- and publishing-tool for a web-application. In multiple Excel-sheets, you could set security, translations, … for elements in the web-application. Then you could press the Publish-button that created thousands of XML-, JavaScript-, and ASP-files, and put them on the webserver.
If you take the Office platform as a whole, it was nearly equivalent to emacs as of Office 97. It’s nuts, really. Just no LISP-like programming language, which could limit its capabilities, but with the .Net CLR, this limitation may be gone.
In other words, Office could nearly replace all of your OS but the kernel on windows, in the same way emacs could for UNIX-ish-ers.
–JM
The CEO on my old workplace used Excel as floorplanning tool when he was planning to restructure the warehouse. Every cell was a quarter of a squaremeter. How’s that for unintended usage?