Dan Bricklin's WikiCalc sounds hot
Dan Bricklin was at last night's dinner, and he was telling me that wikiCalc is getting close to completion. I haven't had the time to play with it yet, but he told me about some features that sound great. As the wikiCalc site explains: "The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet." Some cool things from the wiki side are the ability to track and potentially roll back all changes to the spreadsheet, so it will truly be a collaborative spreadsheet. Since it is fully web capable, you can create spreadsheets that gather data from other wikiCalc spreadsheets across the Internet. I was talking about this with Pito Salas and saying that every cell could point to a URL. He replied that even more importantly, "every cell would have a unique URL." Think about that for a minute. This could be the first big advance in spreadsheets since Excel for Windows appeared. I'll make a point to have Dan give me a complete demo when wikiCalc is ready to launch, so I can do a thorough product review. Dan is one of the patron saints of software in Boston. It would be so great to see him have a big hit.
