I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples:
There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses.
There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects.
There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_.
The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.
I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples:
There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses. There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects. There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_.
The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.