[bchallenor]

Yes this is close to what I was thinking of. Basically I want a tool for manipulating ad-hoc collections (lists/sets) of data. Something that is as powerful as SQL (but easy to set up for throwaway pipelines), as accessible as Excel (but not as restrictive - Excel forces you to work in two-dimensional projections of your actual data), that interfaces well with standard formats (JSON, CSV, Excel) and data sources (grep, find, REST, SQL, log files).

For example, say I want to make a wiki page to track some kind of code migration project. Currently I might grep for usages of a term, and project out the (module name, term) pairs. I then run this query a few times for different terms, and use Excel to merge and pivot the data so the first column is a module name and the remaining columns mark occurrences of each term. I then copy paste into Vim and use a regex to mangle the data into wiki markup.

There is surely a better way of doing this, using a single tool to glue the steps together so that the pipeline is repeatable and the various steps are individually reusable.

[crrashby]

All these suggestions would make for a really powerful tool. The issue is how to make it all approachable to non-coders. Almost all the excel users I've talked to don't know how to make macros let alone any more complex code. I think the issue is trying to make these concepts understandable and usable to everyone so users can get started straight away.

Right now companies don't send their employees on VBA courses even though they could work some much more efficiently with a basic knowledge of coding.

[newman314]

I've been dreaming of a general purpose tool using Excel as a front-end and being able to dynamically manipulate backend data for different presentation.

For example, an asset management database. If I can use this to generate different free form queries, it would be something I would totally throw money at.