[Chyzwar]

I thing that good spreadsheet application with seamless integration with web and with collaboration tooling would be interesting. Decent scripting with something Julia and some kind of build in Jupyter notebook would be exciting to use. Integrated version control where each document lives in own repo that you can shared as just link shpreadsheet:://user.myNewspreadsheet

Excel is relict of old ages: slow, bug ridden, impractical. In my job whenever I need to work with excel I feel pure hate. I send hundreds of this shit to people that are non technical and they... they... send it back.

[beachy]

I think of spreadsheets as like q-tips. Apparently the one thing that the manufacturers of q-tips tell you not to do is to stick them in your orifices. Yet the number one actual use of q-tips is people cleaning gunk from their ears.

People build the most insane, unmaintainable, insecure messes using spreadsheets - because they can.

[F_J_H]

But they can also build a lot of really useful things too, and many do, and create a ton of value.

The same can be said for any programming language/tool. Reminds me of this quote attributed to Doug Gwyn:

"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."

[losteverything]

And you can FAST. What else is there for quick and dirty stuff????

[goatlover]

iPython or Jupyter Notebooks, where you can whip up R, Julia, or other code in your browser, interspersed with markdown, charts and formulas.

[gglitch]

Emacs

[peatmoss]

I like to use org-tables for my spreadsheets:-D

I'm joking... mostly. That said, I really have used elisp functions on an org-tbl in anger before.

[sedachv]

There is also ses-mode (Simple Emacs Spreadsheet) that started shipping with Emacs since version 22.

[7952]

Collaboration is great, but it should start with files. I want to be able to save things to a directory and send them via email. And have a stand alone format that can be archived. File based work flows are used for good reasons.