On 4/8/11, Julian Leviston <[email protected]> wrote: > I quite like what Apple's Numbers does with spreadsheets... something as > simple as naming "sheets" and having multiple variable-sized sheets on the > one page (they call them tables) means you can address cells by name and > things become kinda like variables... > > That one simple thing makes them so much more awesome. > > Julian. >
Julian, I have neither used nor seen Apple's Numbers software. However, based on your description, I recommend you Google "Lotus Improv". Most of its features are now a standard part of OLAP reporting, such as the SQL Server one I mentioned earlier. The idea to directly manipulate dimensions comes from Improv. Very few vendors have added novel interface technology since. An exception would be ProClarity's Decomposition Tree (although I am not sure if the idea was invented at ProClarity or taken from an academic journal). ProClarity is now owned by Microsoft. A leader in business analytics that rolls their own visualiations is Palantir, but they don't appear to have any innovative visualizations. Most OLAP vendors focus on "features" rather than "core" design. e.g. out-of-the-box analytics for customers, products and services, sales, fraud, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, human resources, financial metrics and domain-specific visualizations like the Morningstar Style Box. Alan, When you were at Apple, did Steve ever share his feedback on spreadsheets? In one article I read about the Improv software, from 1991, he as its biggest champion. But he was leading NeXT then. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
