> I wish the expressiveness of tabular data representations was more obvious to more developers.
On the other hand, I wish spreadsheets exposed a more developer-friendly feature set. It wouldn't take much: a sane language for formulas, some form of procedure/subroutine functionality with document or sheet scope, separation of semantic content and graphics.
Part of what's infuriating about Excel is how it's a local optimum not too far away from an even better local optimum. I could see myself actually using spreadsheets more, even professionally, but those poor things are so badly misused it's nauseating.
A mostly forgotten these days aspect of Office is that you can access pretty much everything in it using COM - including both extending and embedding Excel, where you get full control over the data inside the spreadsheet.
And even with just VBA, I've seen some impressive spreadsheet applications (in fact, some even were versioned and had official SDLC process in some companies).
For me the ultimate enhancement to excel would be to directly integrate some SQL dialect into the application.
Assume you had a few worksheets and you want to produce a new one based on some projection of those. You could press some hotkey "New Worksheet from Query..." and then type in the SELECT you want to use for the projection. The column headings could be optionally specified with the appropriate SQL syntax. The schema for the internal SQL dialect could be dynamically generated by inferring table name from sheet name, and column name from the first row in each. You could even have this re-evaluate in real-time, so any changes to base sheets would instantly update the projected sheets.
What I'm suggesting is the opposite of VBA. There should be no difference between the language you use to script the worksheet and the language you use to write formulas in the worksheet itself.
VBA, COM and things like that rest upon the assumption that the worksheet is just a complicated data structure like the DOM.
Want to take Excel seriously? Let's commit to that. Take sheets as the computational model and build from there. A natural operational semantics for them is a graph rewriting system, same as ML and Miranda.
On the other hand, I wish spreadsheets exposed a more developer-friendly feature set. It wouldn't take much: a sane language for formulas, some form of procedure/subroutine functionality with document or sheet scope, separation of semantic content and graphics.
Part of what's infuriating about Excel is how it's a local optimum not too far away from an even better local optimum. I could see myself actually using spreadsheets more, even professionally, but those poor things are so badly misused it's nauseating.