Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think you're trolling; Excel is certainly an option.

But for two things:

  Excel for Mac - $129 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YCOJBC)
  Excel for Win - $121 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0039L2XG6)

And you need a Windows box or Mac with Excel installed. I personally have access to dozens of machines, literally none of which have Excel. All of them have a web browser, and thus access to Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps Script for free. To me, and many others, that makes all the difference in the world.

That's not a major issue.:

You can use Office 2010 web apps FREE from a SkyDrive account and openly collaborate with people or you can pay $20 a month per seat for Office 365 and you will get Sharepoint and ALL Office 2010 desktop apps.

The office web apps work perfectly in all browsers (I've tried Chrome, Firefox and IE).

Considering the cost of playing around with Google spreadsheet with those restrictions, it's possibly a good idea.

Does the Excel web app support VBA? I was under the impression that the 365 apps offer a subset of the functionality of their desktop counterparts.

They don't support VBA directly.

I've always used Excel to publish result data to a spreadsheet rather than the entire thing. Data collection is done using InfoPath so you get the following workflow:

[www:InfoPath Office 365] -> [dt:Excel]-> [www:Excel report on Office 365]

It depends on your use case. I'd be tempted to use a sharepoint list with a custom report for anything more complicated.

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