spreadsheet (was: BookMorph prompt)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Wed Apr 5 18:06:59 UTC 2006


John M McIntosh wrote on Mon, 3 Apr 2006 16:49:40 -0700
> Well Sophie is an electronic book authoring/reader system, it's to  
> replace Powerpoint,  Word and most of MS office.
> (Sorry no spreadsheets, but if someone wants to add that?).
> 
> Since it's built on top of Tweak & Squeak and completely open-source  
> you can choose to add features as you wish.

While Excel has been fabulously successful, that is not the way I would
go for a Tweak/Squeak/Sophie spreadsheet. Instead my first priority
would be to have the best table layout possible since more people seem
to use Excel for that than for actual calculations (not counting simple
sorting of tables). And having several smaller tables floating around in
a larger document seems nicer to me than a single huge 2D (almost 3D
with tabbed "pages") array, though I can understand how such a
structured space can make some people feel more secure (probably more
veteran users than newbies).

For the second step it would be interesting to look at The Analyst for
inspiration and allow arbitrary Smalltalk objects and expressions
instead of just numbers and strings.

Third: I would separate the expressions from the actual cells in the
style of Lotus Improv. This would encourage the users to think in terms
of collections of data like in APL or FScript instead of individual
numbers. It would also make doing things across more than one table less
awkward. The user interface could still present things in terms of per
cell equations when that is more convenient.

Lastly, having such a component I would use it in Sophie for things like
timelines instead of hand coding stuff in Tweak.

-- Jecel



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