What is quite obvious is that ordinary users have taken a fondness for all kinds of spreadsheets.
Over the years spreadsheets have been very popular. Spreadsheets may not be as advanced as many programming languages. All kinds of things may be much better handled in J than a spreadsheet. So why not mix J and spreadsheets? J and grids have been interesting. Some demos of sending data between a spreadsheet and J have been interesting. Having a spreadsheet with all the power of J would be very interesting. 2013/5/11 <[email protected]> > >I can imagine that if one were to look into how the documents are > >generated, it would show interesting things like half the time going to > >parsing XML or some other similarly relevant activity. > > > >This kind of nonsense is rampant in commercial systems. > > > >Anyone in this forum (maybe even working at MS) have a rationale for > >naming an HTML file with a .xls extension? (and distributing it to the > >world....) > > Imagine you want a quick-and-dirty export for medium-competent users. > > You do not want to do all the configuration of sorting etc. because they > want to be able to sort it in their spreadsheet anyway. > > You know that a file of any widespread format and with .xls extension > will be opened in the spreadsheet program the user uses — whether it is > Excel or LibreOffice, Calligra or something else. > > Now: generating valid XLS is a pain. CSV is good, but there are problems > with default encoding. And HTML is opened easily by Excel _and_ contains > encoding header. Also, valid HTML is not complex to parse and it is also > easy to write a script that will reexport HTML file to CSV using any > spreadsheet program (maybe even lynx). So it gives optimal balance of > inconveniences given their distribution of user skills. > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Björn Helgason, Verkfræðingur Fornustekkum II 781 Hornafirði, t-póst: [email protected] gsm: +3546985532 twitter: @flugfiskur http://groups.google.com/group/J-Programming Tæknikunnátta höndlar hið flókna, sköpunargáfa er meistari einfaldleikans góður kennari getur stigið á tær án þess að glansinn fari af skónum /|_ .-----------------------------------. ,' .\ / | Með léttri lund verður | ,--' _,' | Dagurinn í dag | / / | Enn betri en gærdagurinn | ( -. | `-----------------------------------' | ) | (\_ _/) (`-. '--.) (='.'=) ♖♘♗♕♔♙ `. )----' (")_(") ☃☠ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
