[taeric]

Fully agreed on the problems of scaling up places that share data using Excel. I harbor a fear that there is no good way to share data in a large organization, and that you are best looking for ways to shrink the organization and reduce the number of people that need to be involved.

Same thing, largely, seems to apply to documents. Yes, you could farm out a book to a hundred authors and editors. We could build a tool that allows active collaboration that shows what everyone is doing. And we even have some exciting data structures that seem to make this a viable path forward. My experience has been that that isn't the case, though. Specifically, the data structures are fine and nice, but getting even a dozen folks working on the same doc at the same time usually reduces the document to a glorified database with each person doing an optimistic lock on their part so that they can do what they want to do.