DaveNorthCreek
New Member
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2014
- Messages
- 1
Hello Excel professionals,
I am a professional programmer who has been using spreadsheets my whole professional life. I even taught a community course on spreadsheets once. But I'm not a "40 hour/week" Excel user.
I have seen a lot of small businesses run on Excel spreadsheets - as well as large company projects that are organized via spreadsheet. As a programmer, I used to wish that the users would use custom programs and the company database to get work done, but the flexibility and capability of Excel is such that IT is constantly behind the real world.
What IT can do is offer a repository for spreadsheets. Many people use Sharepoint. Others just throw things on a shared drive. There are other options (Alfresco, Documentum, web-based).
The problem with document management systems for spreadsheets is that they are not spreadsheet-aware.
What would you like to see in a spreadsheet repository? I am thinking versioning and branching, the ability to separate data from programming, share-able templates, a preview option so you knew what you were looking at.
As a coder, I can use GitHub to share code and find other's code as a starting point for my work. What do you use to share your templates? Is there a site that already does all of this?
Thanks!
I am a professional programmer who has been using spreadsheets my whole professional life. I even taught a community course on spreadsheets once. But I'm not a "40 hour/week" Excel user.
I have seen a lot of small businesses run on Excel spreadsheets - as well as large company projects that are organized via spreadsheet. As a programmer, I used to wish that the users would use custom programs and the company database to get work done, but the flexibility and capability of Excel is such that IT is constantly behind the real world.
What IT can do is offer a repository for spreadsheets. Many people use Sharepoint. Others just throw things on a shared drive. There are other options (Alfresco, Documentum, web-based).
The problem with document management systems for spreadsheets is that they are not spreadsheet-aware.
What would you like to see in a spreadsheet repository? I am thinking versioning and branching, the ability to separate data from programming, share-able templates, a preview option so you knew what you were looking at.
As a coder, I can use GitHub to share code and find other's code as a starting point for my work. What do you use to share your templates? Is there a site that already does all of this?
Thanks!
