WikiCalc
Dan Bricklin, of VisiCalc fame, has created a new piece of software called WikiCalc. Just like the name implies, this is a web-based Wiki, but instead of editing word-processor style documents, you edit spreadsheets.
I tried it out on my web server and found the setup and use a bit clunky but this is early alpha software so that’s to be expected. It did work. Dan uses AJAX techniques so the calculations happen on the fly. I’m not using mod_perl so there is a significant delay, only a second or two, every time you enter data in a cell. Obviously there is a round trip to the server going on here. For simple data entry, I’m wondering if he can avoid this round tip and instead insert the data locally via JavaScript?
In any case, it’s a cool piece of software with a lot of promise. I’d like to see the UI cleaned up a bit as this thing matures. For instance, unlike regular wikis, the process of creating a new spreadsheet is very deliberate. Pages get “published” and not automatically created as you create WikiWords. That, or I could be missing something.
In addition, it would be great if pages could get tagged like Num Sum spreadsheets. iRows is another one. None of these solutions seems to get it completely right in my head but I still have to hand it to all of these folks. Some heavy lifting was involved in all of these implementations!