Wiki + Spreadsheet

The underlying concept is very simple: spreadsheets are a way to organize text, numbers and formulas into what might be seen as a natively numeric environment: a matrix. So what would happen if we loosed some of the bolts of the numeric-oriented organization, and tried to reuse the same concepts into a more formatting-oriented environment which is naturally collaborative: a wiki.

While I do encourage you to answer this with some fantastic new online service (please provide me with an account and the best e-book reader device available once you’re rich) I had a try at answering this question myself a while ago by writing the Calc macro for Moin.

Basically, the Calc macro allows extracting values found in a wiki page into lists (think columns or rows), and applying formulas and further formatting as wanted.

I believe there’s a lot of potential on the basic concept, and the prototype, even though functional and useful, surely has a lot to evolve, so I’ve published the project in Launchpad to make contributions easier. I actually apologize for not publishing it earlier. There was hope that more features would be implemented before releasing, but now it’s clear that it won’t get many improvements from me anytime soon. If you do decide to improve it, please try to prepare patches which are mostly ready for integration, including full testing, since I can’t dedicate much time for it myself in the foreseeable future.