Hi Ben
Stef Where can I find the latest version of SpreadsheetGridMorph ?
it is one smalltalkhub on StephaneDucasse / PetitsBazars
I think this will be a great addition to the Pharo ecosystem. Here is an interesting excerpt from "How Trello is different" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html)
it requires some work.
---- "Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991. (Yes, I know you were not born yet, but I assure you that computers had been invented. Just hop up here on my knee and shut up.) Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like âif interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?â For example.
Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel. We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the ânumber of injuries this weekâ spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility. Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed ten facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries). He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a three-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job.
Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call âcalculations.â Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table." ----
This is interesting for me since I find myself in that category, mostly using Excel for cleaning and joining sets of data. My usual workflow is: 1. Importing several datasets - usually text files. 2. Manually splitting columns using several different separators . 3. Using VLOOKUP to match data across datasets. 4. Auto-Filtering on non-matching data. Observing where data should match but there are mistakes. 5. Manually massaging data using substring cut/paste formulas. Non-matching data usually group into several different patterns. 6. Iterate over steps 4 & 5.
I'd love to be doing this using Pharo instead. Later in the year I hope to have time to have a go at this.
cheers -ben