[toby]

Exactly, I'd be curious to see something that gives business analysts the interactivity of something like Excel but has ways to avoid the rigid, interlinked-sheets with ridiculous formulas that seem to be inevitable in a large model.

[pmahoney]

I have dreamed of a similar thing for a long time...

When I worked in a (science research) lab, we had a few Excel files we passed around for performing various calculations. These were great in that my non-computer-fluent boss could use them (and even contribute). There were a few input boxes to fill out which were run through some calculations, and the answer spit out.

Pros:

* Single file

* Everyone has Excel installed on desktop

* Accessible. Even if you're not an Excel wizard, you can see and edit the basic formulas.

Cons:

* Rigid grid (Any documentation, notes, etc. must fit into the grid)

* Formulas are hidden, when you might want to highlight the most critical ones

* If you want to calculate intermediate results (which you do, to prevent very long formulas that are hard to read), you've got to plop them in some cells

* No meaningful variable names, A10:A55 what?

Excel is so entrenched, it'd probably be difficult for a slight improvement to gain any traction, but it would have made my life a heck of a lot easier.

And I'm by no means an Excel wizard, so there's a good chance that some of the Cons above can already be avoided... But I still want some kind of hybrid of LabVIEW and Excel.

[sparkie]

Have you seen or tried slate[1] btw, and does it mitigate any of the cons you mention? I've only seen the demos for it and not tried it, so I don't know if it would be useful in practice.

[1]:https://www.useslate.com/

[pmahoney]

I've not heard of slate before. Glancing at the front page, it looks very interesting. I'll definitely take a closer look, thank you.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Lotus Improv and Apple's descendant of it have a better model IMHO. At the very least making formulas a top level construct avoids countless "oops I accidentally updated that cell" errors. But the locked in value effect of Excel is enormous.

[dllthomas]

Functional Reactive Programming has some interesting parallels, though pointing to an FRP package is clearly not a complete solution.