The Future of Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet was a significant innovation of its time. Its popularity is the undisputed testimony of its success. However, we techies know it brings us unspeakable pain when we help people scale a spreadsheet beyond its limitations using a database.

I have been thinking about how to solve this problem. Today there is a post discussing this exact topic. Patrick Logan's comment is what I agree with 100%:

There is a spectrum of choices between a traditional spreadsheet and a traditional database. Perhaps a more usable system in this space would allow someone to begin working more like a spreadsheet and allow shapes to emerge and be supported more like a database, but not expose that support in traditional database terms. The support for those shapes should be more identifiable by the end user programmer without a 20th century software education.

In Concourse, I believe we will support two most important data types in blogs: paragraphs and tables. As you can guess, paragraphs are for Word users and tables for Excel. Certainly you can mix and match them freely. Users should be able to start from a simple table and scale up to a complex data model complete with relationships, foreign keys, indexes, etc. and yet they should not be forced to learn RDBMS terms. If we can do this, I think we have a killer already.