About spread sheets
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See the story of the BirthOfTheSpreadsheet
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Another interesting thing about spreadsheets is the way they mix concrete and abstract. And partly provide help in going from one to the other (ConcreteToAbstract). For example copying a concrete calculation from one cell into a column and having it generalized across all the other rows. Or being able to edit a formula and turn absolute addresses into relative ones.
: OTOH might spreadsheet users often suffer the same problem as urbanists described in SpaceVsInformationFlows. After a while the 2D spatial layout inhibits further abstraction to the real information flows in the spreadsheet. It gets hard to escape the constraints and conventions of the sheet metaphor. Guess this is always the problem of metaphors, but it would be nice if there was some imaginative thinking on this in spreadsheets. Is anything happening here?
: (Hmmm. does this earn BonusFreakyConnectionPoints?)
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Spreadsheets would definitely be good for distributing mathematical and economic models. DariusSokolov kicks off with with his VotingModel (see SimulationResults) for the spreadsheet. Maybe Optimaes should work with this kind of thing too?
JonUdell on "attack of the killer accountants" : XML enabled spread-sheets vs. XBRL : http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/05.html#a989
Spreadsheet like creates : http://www.g93.net/weblog/archives/000121.html
Online Spreadsheets : http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/06/interesting-gillmor-gang.html