PicoCalc: A fully-functional clone of VisiCalc for the PICO-8

A general use string type being the current default, there’d be lots of benefited use cases to locking down rows (heading rows aside) as having to be safe format, or a number etc.

Following some strict "best practices" when using spreadsheets gets you 80% of the way there. The other 20% is functionality that doesn't exist yet, but can be done.

You might be right technically, but one of the features of a spreadsheet is that it stores formulae. (Like a programmable calculator.) Even better, it does it spatially (which fits the way many people remember things), so after a while you can train yourself to put "kilometers driven here, amount of liters of gas there, and your gas usage per 100km is over there" etc. You can do this in a text file, too, of course (see e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Emb...), but a text file is essentially 1-dimensional, which may be a drawback here.

Necessary, no, not by any means. But it is certainly a very-nice-to-have. Something far simpler than Excel would do but as it runs on my phone and I have a licence, why not?¹

> just have a calculator and store values in a text file?

That would be something new to learn and/or a manual process.

I use spreadsheets for little repetitive calcs, or even non-repetitive ones that I want to remember after I've lost the bit of paper from my pocket that they'd otherwise be on. This doesn't happen on-the-go often, but when it does it is handy to have something that lets me go back and edit the calcs easily, and automatically keeps the results rather than me copying them from calculator to notepad. The middle ground that is a logging calculator app could deal with some of these use cases, of course, as long as it has the range of functions a reasonable spreadsheet has (usually I'm just totting up money, but sometimes time-base calculations are useful, or unit conversions (though 1.609 sticks in my mind better than I remember what Excel's CONVERT() function calls miles so usually those are done from memory not with a built-in function), and so on).

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[1] other than the fact it seems to have sync problems, so I never trust it to edit workbooks created elsewhere

I'd say music is fair. The notion of using a desktop computer to listen to music was always a bit strange to me.

Also, a phone, because it's very useful to remain connected (I instruct everyone who works with me that, if they want synchronous responses, they should phone me. All other are asynchronous with low QoS.

The web version was mostly replete last I used it half a decade ago, including realtime collaboration with mac and iOS.

Excel provides Tables for that. Outside tables, you can define named row or column ranges, and reference them by name, including their intersections. The names are just not displayed in the headers (use Tables if you want that).

Dual license CPAL + Artistic.

They are both OSI approved, but uncommon.

completely offtopic:

My dream is to build a super cheap child friendly computer, that the kids can build themselves, has a software keyboard that directly polls the gpio pins so that kids can modify their keyboard instead of having a keyboard controller (just so there is less mistery in what happens when a key is pressed). And the OS is something inspired from LEAP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c that allowing you to evaluate code and apply it to your current file. A bit like your LOAD81 but with text.

I have a prototype now: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... but it has a long way to go.

I was about 10 then. I hope my son (7yo) starts to find this stuff interesting soon.