

Access and Excel vs Web 2.0 - Tichy

Working as a Java consultant, so far I have never had a contract request for a Web 2.0 application. The bulk of (boring) projects that are being conducted in the industry seems to be transferring old processes based on Access and Excel to Web Applications, so that some company or other can have a distributed workflow.<p>So, inspired by the other post about the impeding crisis of the web, I thought I'd put forward the idea that if the IT industry has been relatively healthy lately, it was not because of a boom of Web 2.0 startups, but rather because of said Access to Web exodus. However, that will only be a finite source of new work, as eventually all Excel sheets will have been migrated (or switched to Google apps). Hopefully by then Web 2.0 will be the job motor...<p>On a related note, is Excel perhaps the most overlooked "Virtual Machine" out there? Here is a business idea I just remembered: a platform for sharing special purpose Excel sheets. For example you want to create a business plan, might be nice to have a trusted source for looking for an Excel template (ie social network like, rated by users etc.), rather than having to Google for it and download it from weird sources. No idea how to deal with the danger of viri, though. 
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bayareaguy
Excel can be a good intermediate representation for talented non-programmers.

A few years back I did some work with a non-programmer who was an expert in
administrating Microsoft Exchange. Other programmers were expected to get
knowledge from him but the team didn't have a good way to represent it and
very attempt at getting him to do CIM-style modeling was a disaster.

I was new to the team when they asked me to help. I threw together some Perl
modules that took an Active Directory dump and generated a pile of Excel
workbooks and made those the common model for the information.

None of the other programmers liked the idea of Perl, but I was able to
encapsulate it as a special Visual Studio build rule so they never had to do
anything other than occasionally run a special build rule.

The result was a success because Excel was something the expert understood and
working from the generated worksheet allowed everyone to come to agreement on
what existing entities and attributes were needed to do what they wanted.

