I did have a sort-kinda Excel replacement idea that I have half implemented, but it was based on distributed data sitting in OneDrive/DropBox/Google Drive etc. with formulas in a derived macro language that looked like Excel but worked like SQL.
It's built around Roslyn to do the evaluations. I did it that way because I wanted the flexibility of being able to run high-level style, predefined macros based around Excel, but with the ability to drop down to scripted C# if necessary.
It was a classic case of overkill. I need a way to do custom data extraction without re-writing the extract every time somebody made a new request. Some of the data had to be supplied by the client. I ended up with a monstrous, hash-based quasi database that runs inside an AWS Lambda.
I only half finished it because it does what I want at the moment (custom data exports for customers) but after I had it working I thought it was so stupid powerful I had to pause.
The main problem I see with something that is entirely distributed, but programmable at the C# level means it's also incredibly unsafe for anybody who is hosting it.
It would need a lot more work to be interactive (batch oriented for safety at the moment) but as an idea it seems like the next logical step from Google Sheets / Excel with a short learning curve for Excel jockeys.
Roslyn is an astonishing piece of tech really. The ability to precompile statements and call them by passing arguments is bonkers, I haven't played with anything like it since being a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s.
It's built around Roslyn to do the evaluations. I did it that way because I wanted the flexibility of being able to run high-level style, predefined macros based around Excel, but with the ability to drop down to scripted C# if necessary.
It was a classic case of overkill. I need a way to do custom data extraction without re-writing the extract every time somebody made a new request. Some of the data had to be supplied by the client. I ended up with a monstrous, hash-based quasi database that runs inside an AWS Lambda.
I only half finished it because it does what I want at the moment (custom data exports for customers) but after I had it working I thought it was so stupid powerful I had to pause.
The main problem I see with something that is entirely distributed, but programmable at the C# level means it's also incredibly unsafe for anybody who is hosting it.
It would need a lot more work to be interactive (batch oriented for safety at the moment) but as an idea it seems like the next logical step from Google Sheets / Excel with a short learning curve for Excel jockeys.
Roslyn is an astonishing piece of tech really. The ability to precompile statements and call them by passing arguments is bonkers, I haven't played with anything like it since being a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s.