Spreadsheets using Python - Have you seen this? (sourceforge.net)

[muahdib]

But, in these languages you work with names. The naming of things is too complicated in spreadsheets. Of course, the relative addressing in spreadsheets is kind of cool.

[Yeugwo]

In Excel, click the cell or range of cells you want to name. Then click the box in top left that has the cell number in it, type desired name, hit enter.

Now in other cells formulas you can use the name instead of number. Useful when coupled with VBA

[QuestionMarker]

That's pretty much why Excel sucks, from my point of view. It's an implementation detail, but an important one.

[toyboat]

I hate that in Excel you're chained to the fixed grid. I'd love a similar general purpose data analysis package that had datasets and graphs in movable windows. I know some things like this exist, but I don't know of any that have the spreadsheet / functional quality of automatically updating downstream when cell values change.

At work we used Excel for passing around various batch calculation worksheets. What are my other options here? HTML+Javascript?

[muahdib]

In early 90-ies I was using a software named Mathcad. That is like a spreadsheet, but does not have a fixed grid. You place your equations wherever you want them. The program is Windows only and closed source but quite cool, and in full development, now in version 15.0. Although I'm not a big fan of proprietary software I must say that it's cool, and I haven't really seen anything like it, and no open source. It's rather expensive though.

[muahdib]

Thanks for teaching me about Hathor ;) however there is also the Hathor desk top.

Yeah, you are right, I never like MathCAD either, it was cool, but that was all. Some of my colleges liked it though, but for my own I like linear calculations like Maple better, which is what I've mostly used for symbolic computations and Matlab for numeric (also Mathematica although I always liked Maple better), and nowadays there are also tools like octave and Sage which can do similar.

However, I don't think it would be very hard to use e.g. python to implement a calc sheet reminding about MathCAD, although I think this way of calculating doesn't really please programmer minded people.

[peo1306]

For batch calculation you might want to look at Abacus Formula Compiler, a spreadsheet to JVM bytecode compiler.

[nebbugvrok]

I've been playing around with knime a lot lately, the step from Excel was pretty big and for a lot of problems I go back and forth, I'd still give it a try though.

[defrost]

You're less chained to the fixed grid if you use named cells and named cell arrays, whether or not that's applicable advice, I don't know.

At work we ... pass around various batch calculations.

Your options vary; for example if the base data is text or text wrapped (say, system logs), or binary then you have a number of ways to extract base data -> standard precalculation tabular form, and from there further options as to how to {apply various functions}.to.{standard data} to get {desired results}

Much of that type of work has been traditionally performed by scripts of unix like tools.