People mostly use Excel for making lists that have columns. Roger Jennings provides a list of typical subjects: "sales contacts, students and grades, billable time, customer service issues, employee vacation and sick-leave time, event planning,..." Other past software that's taken different approaches to this problem includes Hypercard, FileMaker, Lotus Agenda, Lotus Notes, and Ecco Pro. Apparently this problem is important to a lot of people.
There are a bunch of new projects around working on this problem; they have in common that they make the results accessible over the internet by multiple people at once. Relatively complete systems I know something about -------------------------------------------------- NumSum: from Steve Yen, the guy who wrote TrimSpreadsheet, a basic JavaScript spreadsheet. Basically you edit a spreadsheet in your browser, then hit 'save', and it's on the Web. Pretty alpha last I looked; probably has some security problems. Each table has an URL; rows aren't URL-addressable. http://numsum.com/ wikiCalc: from Dan Bricklin, who designed spreadsheets in the first place. Each Wiki page is a spreadsheet table, with all that implies --- each table has an URL; rows aren't URL-addressable. More advanced spreadsheet than NumSum's. GPL, Perl, alpha. Looks easy to get the data out later if you want to stick it in something else instead, although of course the "databasey" structure is somewhat implicit. http://www.softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/ JotSpot: from a team including Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer, and Scott McMullan. They wrote a Wiki in which each page is kind of like a database record, with XML templates that can include queries over all the pages. Rows are URL-addressable and can appear in multiple views. Supports paste from Excel. Software is proprietary and hosted (not available for download). Rumors of Yahoo acquisition. Easy to download all of your data. http://www.jot.com/ http://developer.jot.com/CompanyDirectoryScreenshots http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=556 infogami: from Aaron Swartz. Not much there yet, but it's a Wiki in which pages can have fields that get plopped into templates. http://infogami.com/ DabbleDB: Avi Bryant used to work for Cincom Smalltalk, and he left to start this new startup, called Smallthought; he's trying to create a (hosted, proprietary) environment for people to create database apps as easily as they create spreadsheets. http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/11/dabbledb-online-app-building-for-everyone/ http://smallthought.com/blog/ http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/dabble-db-new-look-in-web-databases.html Sproutliner: Ajax PHP outliner with columns, by Glen Murphy, the proce55ing installation artist. GPL. Beta. Incredibly easy. A little *too* Ajaxy --- apparently not even tables are URL-addressable. http://sproutliner.com/ Relatively complete systems I know nothing about ------------------------------------------------ Thingamy: http://www.thingamy.com/what.html QuickBase: http://www.quickbase.com/p/home.asp Trac. Comparisons ----------- DabbleDB vs. Wikicalc: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2005-November/006058.html OpenRecord vs. JotSpot vs. Excel vs. Dabble DB, plus CSV, JSON, SQL, Google Base, Ning, Jackrabbit, WebDAV, XML, and RDF: http://openrecord.org/dojo/2006-01-09/data_model_comparison.html Thought-Provoking Material I Wouldn't Recommend Novices Drop Excel For ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of these are vaporware; others are incomplete. OpenRecord http://www.openrecord.org/ Sweilkif (vaporware) http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2004-March/000756.html The WowBar BTS. Python, Twisted, GPL. I developed this for a bug tracking system for WowBar. darcs get http://labs.commerce.net/repos/wowbar/ and look in the wowbarbts directory. Ray Ozzie talks about reorganizing Microsoft around internet services, including, in particular, online databases. http://www.scripting.com/disruption/ozzie/TheInternetServicesDisruptio.htm SnikiSniki: a Semantic Network Wiki, in which each page has associated a bunch of triples, and you can easily display tables. Python, no license attached. Not presently active or available. http://del.icio.us/url/e5c1f6d17d16c185e21fca4b837befc5
