You no longer have an excuse for keeping your passwords and sensitive data on that password-protected Excel file. It’s not convenient and it’s not safe!

While there are numerous efforts to launch web based MS Word replacements, it seems that MS Excel risks no real competition from Web 2.0.

This sounds strange because in the past spreadsheets have always played a key role in determining the success of new technologies. It was Dan Bricklin with his VisiCalc to move accountants and analysts from mainframes to personal computers. For many of them the appearance of Mitch Kapor’s brainchild Lotus 123 was the main reason to migrate from Apple II to the IBM PC world. Later on, Excel was one of the best justifications to graphical interfaces, i.e. to operating systems with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse as pointing device.

NumSum by TrimPath is today the only project in this arena. It just mimics Excel’s basic functionalities and adds a “social” flavour with the introduction of tags and easy spreadsheet embedding in weblogs.

What I’d really like to see is a nice Ajax application that overcomes the two big issues that makes me uncomfortable with Excel.

• my spreadsheet are not ubiquitous
• the present spreadsheet paradigm is bad

The first point is quite self explanatory. The second refers to the awful way of mixing data structure, formulas and presentations. Excel and the OpenOffice clone did nothing to keep them apart. To change one of this three components you need to rebuild the entire spreadsheet.

Quantrix Modeler is a very nice and professional solution that embraces a new and sound paradigm, a paradigm that solve Excel inconsistencies. It doesn’t come cheap though. Flexisheet has an identycal approach, it’s open source but just for Mac OS X and it seems it will never get out of Beta.

I see a lot of space here for real Web 2.0 companies and VCs. It’s not as quick and easy as building an online to-do manager, but it could be a huge win. Move fast before big players enter this market. The more likely to launch are those that already owns a lot of the customer’s data: Salesforce.com is the first I could think of. It would be very easy for Marc Menioff to offer an Excel replacement to play with sales, invoicing and accounting data. Unless Google decides otherwise, see here and here.

What will Microsoft do to counter this trend? I agree with Paul Graham, when in Hackers & Painters he wrote

I expect Microsoft will develop some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the operating system works together with servers they control. […] I don’t expect Microsoft to all the way to the extreme of doing the computations on the server, with only a browser for the client, if they can avoid it.

Recent news and comments seems to confirm this strategy.

PS: Of course the ability to import Excel file could be a nice feature for any “good enough” Web 2.0 solution, as it was for Excel the ability to read Lotus 123 files.