How many people are frustrated by just doing a sum or match count–or don’t even try? How about auto-resizing of fields? Or viewing two tables side-by-side? Or adding comments without filling a cell. Or creating simple charts? These should be easy on spreadsheets.

Things that seem tricky like using a relational database on the backend or versioning data aren’t really tricky, and they’re not complex concepts.

This is 2011! You should be able to have multiple tables side by side, with descriptive bubbles and dynamically updated data, automatic formula calculation from templates, and form data-entry workflow without even thinking about it.

This morning I was thinking about how we’re stuck with pretty much the
interface VisiCalc gave us back in 1980 (without the user-friendliness) and it doesn’t have to be that way.

90% of people that use spreadsheets don’t even know how get the sum for a column. Which is the whole reason spreadsheets were invented! That stuff should be automatic. Highlight and click the big green plus sign. Or select a row and type a word and hit “filter” or “count”

I like the idea of storing formulas, but I think I could go further to make it easier, so grandma can use it like a calculator backed by a database. So she buys crap like QuickBooks to balance her checkbook. It’s not that it’s too hard to do, it’s that the UI of spreadsheets is so horrible.

I think we can do better and I’m toying with the idea of building a
better spreadsheet. There has to be a better interface.