Chris Granger (of Light Table fame) and his bunch at Eve are working on something like that. There are a bunch of presentations on YouTube. They are more looking at it abstractly as a possible programming / data model, than purely 'compile an Excel sheet to a programming library'.
That's interesting but I think it addresses a different problem. It seems to be directed at having a more natural and intuitive way to construct and analyse data.
The thing is most business users are already familiar with pivot tables in Excel, for as clunky as they are. But Excel is not only used for data, it is also largely used for a complex business logic. And that's where you have a logic which IT will struggle to understand and therefore should rather not own, and that the business needs to set up and maintain. Think complex tax calculations, or a business plan, or the logic for a quote on a big project, etc. These will be highly non trivial in term of the logic the spreadsheet will follow, and that's where a library that could just reliably swallow a spreadsheet and make it a function IT can use but the business can maintain has a lot of value.
cm2187|9 years ago
The thing is most business users are already familiar with pivot tables in Excel, for as clunky as they are. But Excel is not only used for data, it is also largely used for a complex business logic. And that's where you have a logic which IT will struggle to understand and therefore should rather not own, and that the business needs to set up and maintain. Think complex tax calculations, or a business plan, or the logic for a quote on a big project, etc. These will be highly non trivial in term of the logic the spreadsheet will follow, and that's where a library that could just reliably swallow a spreadsheet and make it a function IT can use but the business can maintain has a lot of value.