Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  wikiCalc (09 Nov 2005) Then one day it hit me. What is, reportedly, the most common type of database system for maintaining and sharing simple databases? A spreadsheet. Oh, no! That means that I should implement a spreadsheet as part of the system. Compared to my low key ListGarden, how very public that would be, going back to my past, and, worse yet, since it will be Open Source everybody can check out my messy coding style and find my novice bugs in an area connected to my name and reputation. I've only prototyped spreadsheets before and did a little bit of the code. Bob Frankston (VisiCalc) and Bill Lynch (Slate's At-Hand pen computer spreadsheet) did most of the actual spreadsheet engine coding, not me. I hadn't worked out all of those hard problems before. I decided with trepidation to go ahead. However, when Dave Winer came out with his OPML tools, Mr. Outliner creating another outlining tool, I knew that I was another part of a wave that's OK to ride. A spreadsheet is a metaphor that many, many people understand and are comfortable with for creating interesting layouts - probably a lot more than those who know how to do HTML editing with tables. The spreadsheet metaphor with its common functions very explicitly lets you work with a style of table cells that allows you to create and maintain a myriad of layout arrangements appropriate for data presentation. It isn't just a table -- it's a two dimensional space on which you can place items wherever you like and where you know how to rearrange things. I felt that while you would edit in a spreadsheet with the A-B-C 1-2-3 grid showing, the final output, like the printout from the productivity product, would be static and only show cell borders where you explicitly set them. Calculating is for authoring and maintaining, not reading, in this case. Anyway, most data will probably be static text or numbers. You usually will only need a little bit of calculating at most, such as for line numbers or totals. As I was starting to code, I kept thinking about names. I wanted something that sort of explained what this was. I tried SpreadGarden because it is like ListGarden and "Garden" is a registered trademark my company owns, but that sounded too much like using fertilizer, not web authoring. Then one of the few people who saw an early version suggested "wikiCalc". Again: Oh, no! Calling it "calc" too blatantly reminds people of my past and makes it sound like I did this for the name, but it describes the product so well that I just had to use it. It's such a good name. (Pretty much everybody I told about it smiles and tells me to use it.) I checked with Bob Frankston. He didn't mind. And wikiCalc.com was available... Unfortunately, with a name like that I had to make sure that the program calculates and not just stores numbers, even from day one. Sigh. There went a lot more programming before I could show it off in alpha. Article URL: http://danbricklin.com/log/2005_11_09.htm Read 72 more articles from Dan Bricklin sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Design Choices Can Cripple a Website  Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate by Michael Schrage  Buy from Amazon .com | .uk | .ca | .fr | .de |          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy