Bricklin's WikiCalc: Much much more than just a mashup of wikis and spreadsheets

• Between the Lines
• November 10, 2005
• Posted by David Berlind @ 12:39 pm

Drawing from one of the names � VisiCalc � that gave birth to the PC industry, electronic spreadsheet co-inventor Dan Bricklin has gone public with an alpha version and his plans to release WikiCalc � an open source browser-based solution that takes some of the most powerful features of spreadsheets (eg: the ability to format anything including text and calculated data into a tabular layout), some of the most endearing features of Wikis (ie: their simple markup language and instant ability to collaborate on Web-based documents), and marries them not only to each other, but also in very behind-the-scenes-fashion to advanced Web page formatting techniques that involve tables, HTML templates, and cascading style sheets. You can visit the aforelinked Web site to download a copy and try it for yourself.

To the extent that Wikis make collaboration on Web-based documents simple but are sorely lacking in their ability to easily control the overall presentation and format of those documents (colors, fonts, and positioning of text or tabular data that may or may not require tabulation), the alpha 0.1 version of WikiCalc is not just the marriage of Wikis to spreadsheets, but also lays the foundation for a very simple yet powerful browser-based Web page publishing tool the likes of which we haven't seen yet.

... snip... see http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2141

Why is this important? By making WikiCalc compliant with a standard document format � be it OpenDocument, Microsoft's Office XML Reference Schema (should Microsoft choose to open it up to the point that it's really open), or some other document storage standard � that too would also help bridge the thin and thick worlds because developers of software that runs in either (or both as WikiCalc does) can develop other products and suites that are capable of opening, closing, saving, publishing, and sharing the same documents that WikiCalc opens, closes, saves, publishes, and shares. That way, if you'd rather work with spreadsheet software like Corel's Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3, whatever gOffice is coming up with, or even Microsoft's Excel when you or the people would prefer to work, you or they can. That's what standards are for.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2141

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-- MartinCleaver - 10 Nov 2005

This is getting some more publicity now:

• News.com story
• blog entry about demo including video

Since WikiCalc is written in Perl and can run as CGI, it might be interesting to try integrating it with TWiki somehow, perhaps as a plugin once the CGI parts are modularised.

-- RichardDonkin - 19 Feb 2006

There's a screencast available from http://www.socialtext.com/node/83 (7mb) for an easy intro, interesting technology.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 14 Jun 2006

About WikiCalc It's version 0.96 is released Read more at http://www.socialtext.com/node/117

-- SopanShewale - 03 Nov 2006