Copacetic

One of the worlds most popular RAD environments is Excel. But Excel is a pain to share and god forbid you need a third party to enter data into your carefully crafted spreadsheets. Now imagine this problem compounded n times over when an organisation attempts to collate data via a shared spreadsheet. You get to play our favourite corporate games  such as,

• Who has the master copy?
• Where did all my changes go?
• I updated that last week
• We’ve changed the format this month

So we all love Excel, but we need better ways to control data entry and sharing.

So take your Excel spreadsheet and parse all the presentation material out it in order to generate a web page.  Now use an AJAX interface to hide intermediate workbooks, behinds the scenes tables etc. etc. Now ink in the data entry fields so they become highlighted. You now have a AJAX/HTML application version of your spreadsheet.

Now you load this into a runtime framework (probably encompassing the Excel DLL ‘cos who wants to rewrite all that code) and you wrap it in a proper web login environment along with profile and preference information and you store all computation and changes in a database so every version of the spreadsheet is kept when each set of values is changed by each user.

Finally you allow the designer to upload new versions of the spreadsheet and store that in a history as well. Finally you offer a sharing capability so a user can invite other users to access and use spreadsheet, safe in the knowledge that a single master and all changes are held centrally.

Now you can offer it as a hosted service, charging each user a few cents for each spreadsheet they access or charging the owner a most substantial fee on a monthly basis for hosting their application.

How hard can that be?

The new  Live Writer beta fixes the categories problem where a long list of categories was not visible once in exceeded the height of the screen.

Live Writer continues to impress me.

Tom Murphy (one of Irelands most pre-eminent software PR guys) has moved his blog to a new home.

Tom is always worth a read.

SkypeBlock

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

I see Microsoft has started blocking skype after the latest security update. Ladies and gentlemen, you may start your conspiracy engines…

A kick right in the PC. Dell is going to preinstall the Google Desktop, toolbar and friends on all their PCs.

Ballmer must be having a shit fit!

Reg Cheramy lists 13 reasons to consider Microsoft for Web 2.0 Development.

The one reason not to? Your stuff will probably not run correctly in Firefox or Safari.

Darren points out that Microsoft’s new ad-center doesn’t support Firefox (or I believe any browser other than IE). This is a patently stupid position and the immediate reaction is to look on it as a deliberate attempt to exclude Firefox and other browsers. However I believe the explanation is simpler and runs right to the very heart of Microsoft’s culture.

Most people in Microsoft drink the coolaid and are completely immersed in Microsoft culture. In their eyes Safari and Firefox users are marginal communities they don’t understand and could care less about. All their internal propaganda tells them that IE is the world’s most popular browser and also has the biggest market share. There complete technology stack is based on activeX controls and the the minute they start coding it takes a huge amount of energy to buck the status quo inside MIcrosoft and say we will work with the other browsers. They have time to market constraints just like the rest of us. So they take the path of least resistance, whack their site together with Visual Studio Web tools and hey presto, instant incompatiblity, straight out of the box.

It would take a message from Bill to change this but that ain’t about to happen, despite all Robert Scoble’s good works.

Just spotted this, looks like Robert agrees with me.