The most important piece of software in my world is Microsoft Excel. Not because it is extraordinarily extraordinary, but because it is absolutely the best at what it does, and what it does is capture financial data. Excel is pretty much the sole survivor of the spreadsheet wars which ended about 15 years ago. Sure there may be some people who still use Lotus 123 or Quattro. Applix still has their Unix based spreadsheet, but for the most part, the solar system of spreadsheets has collapsed into the singularity that is Excel.
It might not have gone that way. Lotus Approach was a stunningly novel system. Multiplan was faster and more capable than Excel when they competed. IFPS had the best programming back end for complex calculations long before Visual Basic was a glint in Microsoft's eyes. But Excel survived.
The reason Excel functionally works in my world is that it is a very good starting place for a database. Relational databases are essentially tables, and tables are basically two dimensional arrays of cells. That's a spreadsheet. At the level of individual work, a spreadsheet is the right size for human comprehensible tables of data. But sometimes you want to present it. In practical terms that means you have to move it from a spreadsheet table to a Word table or maybe an HTML table.
This may come as a surprise, but there has emerged no useful standard definition of tables that spans spreadsheets, HTML docs, Word documents and databases. You can basically cut and paste and hope, but most of the time it's a nightmare of reformatting, resizing and tweaking. Now somebody may come to correct me by pointing me to some oddball XML standard, perhaps even XMLA, but how many vendors support XMLA?
This is what makes Google docs unusable for a guy like me. I think it's unlikely that they're ever going to squeeze enough javascript into that webpage to handle conversions smartly. Microsoft doesn't do it well with all their bloated code so why should I expect Google to? I don't.
Microsoft has done something well. That is they have expanded their Text to Table converter in Excel to a stardard import wizard in SQL Server. It is another singularly important triumph that has made it possible to migrate data from where creative people create it, in spreadsheets, to corporate data warehouses from where it can be efficiently distributed to where analytical people consume it. This is the real guts of the Business Intelligence business upon which more and more is starting to depend.
One of these days, somebody is going to make tables universal and that universal object will be to financial data what the PDF is to documents.
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