Surely I'm not the only one that remembers someone doing this with Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80's...how far we've come. What's next, a database in a spreadsheet? Word processor? Modem application?
At my last company, someone wrote a format to encode RDF data in spreadsheets.
Google Sheets was our primary tool for configuration and content authoring for way too long. Eventually, he added support for OOXML sheets, too. At some point, a long time later, we started migrating to TTL, and thank goodness for that.
The code was all open-sourced, by the way, but I'd rather not link it here because I don't really want this username associated with that company.
Excel is either brilliant or horrible (depending on your role in dealing with the output) at being re-purposed to do "the wrong thing".
I've had form templates sent to me in Excel because of the easy-to-use table layout controls. I've had games sent to me in Excel because VBA was so damn easy to program simple ideas in. I've had PoCs of algorithms sent to me in Excel because the graphical chaining of each step is so illustrative.
I've also seen the nightmare that haunts businesses who define their business logic through a bunch of interconnected Excel files. As an aside, this seems like an area ripe for "disruption" (remember when "disruption" was a bad word?), which is where tools like excel_to_code
could probably make a large impact. If you could validate and test the entire business logic, as expressed in Excel files, you could reduce or eliminate the "Excel defined business rules" nightmare. If you can do this, there are thousands of SMEs that will be knocking at your door.
I personally don't use Excel for much, and I used to deride people who used it for "the wrong task", but I've recently had to swallow my pride, and accept that it's a serious power tool for most non-programmer people. I'd even go so far to say that it's the most successful "visual programming" tool out there. And by a long way.
I'll point out that if you find yourself with a RDBMS-like situation in Excel I highly recommend using Excel 2013+ 'tables' feature which adds foreign keys and better pseudo-joins (in pivot tables) inside of Excel. Better than anything hacked together with VLOOKUP. (heck, I've even seen some people hack it together with only SUMIF)
I don't know, I have no experience with 2010 so I went with the lower bound I can guarantee as opposed to potentially giving harmful wrong information. Can't edit my comment now.
Google Sheets was our primary tool for configuration and content authoring for way too long. Eventually, he added support for OOXML sheets, too. At some point, a long time later, we started migrating to TTL, and thank goodness for that.
The code was all open-sourced, by the way, but I'd rather not link it here because I don't really want this username associated with that company.