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wikiCalc

Dan Bricklin [the author of VisiCalc] has come up with another brilliant idea called "wikiCalc." Here's how he describes it at the alpha test site

"The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet..."

Daniel Terdiman of CNET News.com wrote about it here today. WikiCalc kind of looks to me like a poor mans [open-source] version of what I think Quicken is trying to do with QuickBase and what Dan suggests Microsoft might be trying to do with Grove. Some people will object to putting the data in spreadsheets out in the open like this but the dirty little secret of private spreadsheets on individual PCs is that they are full of errors and inconsistencies. A little openness [in other words transparency] is likely to be a very good thing both for collaboration and for accuracy & reliability.

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