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Working, as I am, on a spreadsheet application, I often refer to the Open Formula specification which does a fairly good job of providing useful edge-case tests, and noting inconsistencies between the implementation of various functions across Excel, Gnumeric, Open Office, etc.
Recently I noticed that one of their test cases seemed to have a spurious [...]

At the end of November I parted company with Socialtext. I achieved more in my first two weeks there than the subsequent 8 months, and I never managed to find the arguments that would convince the company to fund the project properly. With a new CEO and VPE in place, Socialtext is moving in [...]

A lot of people have been asking me recently what I’ve been up to for the past few
months, and when they’re going to get to see all the interesting stuff we’ve been up to with SocialCalc. Hopefully I’ll finally have something to point to in the next couple of days, but I’m embarrassed to say [...]

Eugene Kim raises some interesting questions about the addressibility of content from on-line spreadsheets in a blog post: “Spreadsheets 2.0 and Transclusions”
Some of this is similar to issues Danny Ayers raised about “WikiCalc and the Semantic Web” a year ago.
Both, however, fall into a trap that is a common source of spreadsheet woe: the difference [...]

When we took over Ireland’s oldest ISP, almost 3 years ago, we hoped that we would be able to turn it around in 6-12 months. Unfortunately it was in much worse shape than we had been led to believe, and it took a lot longer than planned.
After several tumultuous years, the beast has been tamed, [...]

In the UK, the de facto accounting system for small business is SAGE. This is most unfortunate, as it is an appalling piece of software for many, many reasons. I can rant for hours on its many shortcomings, but today I’ll mention two of the biggest ones, and how we’ve been able [...]

My next Excel Top Tip is how to calculate the last day of a month. I thought there was a function to do this as part of a whole suite of date manipulation functions, but I seem to have imagined that, as I couldn’t find. I was dreading having to do lots of nasty date [...]

I’m trying to build a simple bookkeeping system in Excel, and I’m learning all manner of interesting things. But I ran into a significant problem that I’ve found a really ugly solution to. If this is really the best way to do this, hopefully this post will be useful to someone else someday. If it’s [...]

I’ve been working with CSV files a lot recently, mostly as a way of building web based management information tools out of SAGE data.
But I’ve always really hated working with the interface to Text::CSV_XS. So I put together Text::CSV::Simple. You just point it at the file you want, and read out all the rows:
my $parser [...]

dull financial stuff
play Space Invaders and Pacman!

[via why the lucky stuff]

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