Anything that boosts the profile of the humble spreadsheet gets a thumbs up from me. I almost always start taking notes with a spreadsheet. It may be something as simple as two fields: one for the actual note and two for a category. If it's trivial to add a timestamp, I'll do that too.
The notes end up being far more organized than as if I had just put them chronologically into an empty text editor (though in a pinch, I may just write my notes in a tab delimited format and import them into a spreadsheet). Even if I never need to chronologically reverse sort or sort by category.
More importantly, when doing a research project, it serves as a checklist for what I need to do. Awhile back I wanted to track homicides in my city and so I started off with just name of victim, name of suspect, age, time of day, link to a news article, time of arrest, address, etc. Without a spreadsheet, you'd forget at least one of those details as you did your research in the traditional note taking fashion.
And when you make your model more complex: i.e. realize that you need to record time of arrest, charges filed, age of suspect, etc., the spreadsheet makes it easy to backtrack and fill your past data rows.
And when you realize you need to make your data model more complicated: the fact that a number of suspects could be implicated and charged for a single homicide, and face various charges, you are all ready to have your "notes" be put into a database.
And now that it's in a database, it's just a weekend of hacking to make a homicides website or a map.
Spreadsheets are a pretty good tool, and I've used them to sling data along with databases, scripting languages, and compiled programming languages. However I always feel like there should be a next generation ad-hoc data tool coming along that preserves the accessibility of a spreadsheet, while expanding capability in a more manageable way. Once you start needing or wanting capabilities of a programming language, you're stuck in the of the confines of what the spreadsheet framework provides, or need to mostly abandon the spreadsheet to make the leap of putting the data into some other programming environment. It's not hard, and we aren't lacking in ways to make the leap, but it seems like there should be a better way.
David Pollak (of Lift fame) is working on a re-envisaging of the spreadsheet called Visi [1]. One of his aims is to provide a bit more structure and verification, without compromising usability by non-technical people.
IMO, Access is closer to a spreadsheet than a Database and fills that need fairly well. (By that I mean how the UI is setup and what it focuses on.) IMO there is a huge opertunity for a similar interface and a much better back end. Something like sharepoint + access.
I have built a couple enterprise one-off tools on Access and at the time (6 years ago) it was fantastic - easy to get access to remote databases, sync to local stores, run complicated data reports or structure entries using forms so that anyone can use it and it would look nice. I think Google docs + forms fills some of this function now, but I still think that was some of the most raw fun I have had using code to quickly and efficiently solve a business problem.
At first I thought you were being snarky and that was some inside joke...but looks like a cool tool, thanks!
http://orgmode.org/
The one advantage of spreadsheets is that most people know how to work with them. And with Google Docs, you get easy collaborative note-taking, plus some of the fancier features and effects (I find color-formatting empty/filled cells to be useful)
The notes end up being far more organized than as if I had just put them chronologically into an empty text editor (though in a pinch, I may just write my notes in a tab delimited format and import them into a spreadsheet). Even if I never need to chronologically reverse sort or sort by category.
More importantly, when doing a research project, it serves as a checklist for what I need to do. Awhile back I wanted to track homicides in my city and so I started off with just name of victim, name of suspect, age, time of day, link to a news article, time of arrest, address, etc. Without a spreadsheet, you'd forget at least one of those details as you did your research in the traditional note taking fashion.
And when you make your model more complex: i.e. realize that you need to record time of arrest, charges filed, age of suspect, etc., the spreadsheet makes it easy to backtrack and fill your past data rows.
And when you realize you need to make your data model more complicated: the fact that a number of suspects could be implicated and charged for a single homicide, and face various charges, you are all ready to have your "notes" be put into a database.
And now that it's in a database, it's just a weekend of hacking to make a homicides website or a map.