Excel as a design and programming tool

About three weeks ago, I attended a lecture about Excel 2007 and Excel services. I have to say that I was pretty impressed. Not only does Excel have a ton of new features and a brand-new (and much better) graphics interface, but you can also now publish Excel spreadsheets on a departmental server (Microsoft Sharepoint). This means that you can let your colleagues and partners view business-related data and graphs through the company’s intranet or extranet. You also may use a spreadsheet as a calculation engine (I will try to explain the concept of a calculation engine later on).

As I drove back to the office from the lecture, a thought hit me. Maybe Excel 2007/Services is the first software package that can create a real and effective dialogue between business users and programmers. For the first time, there is a tool which is both understood by huge numbers of business users (who know how to use Excel far better than programmers) and can be used as a development component.

If this is true, this is an opportunity for business users and information technology workers to radically reduce implementation time of new systems and to engage in a much more effective (and pleasant) dialogue.

I will explain more about this in the upcoming posts.

Posted on August 23, 2006 by Yoav Ezer 
Filed Under Methodology

Comments

2 Responses to “Excel as a design and programming tool”

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