I've recently gotten onto the kick of moving a lot of my documents and spreadsheets into the cloud - Google Docs in particular.
The basic motivation is the failure of my portable hard drive. A NetGear ReadyNAS Duo solved the storage problems for things like digital photos and videos. But sometimes you just want to make a quick update to a spreadsheet and you don't feel like waiting until you get home.
My NAS is turned off, as is my router and modem, when I'm not using it so remote access is not option. Windows sync is a pain in the butt that makes shutting down take forever. So my solution was to put some of those documents in the cloud - accessible from any internet connection.
But why-oh-why won't Google support JavaScript macros in their documents and spreadsheets (presentations too but I don't use those).
Having the macros stored with the document (and with the template) would avoid any cross-site scripting issues, would harness the power of the browser, and would make all the world's javascript libraries accessible!
I know Zoho spreadsheets support VB macros but not in the same way that Excel does - I can't add in references to other libraries to extend the power of the native system.
And who made VB the language of macros anyways!? If you want to program in VB then fine - use Excel (or Zoho). If you want to live in the cloud then use JavaScript!!!
two words: Thumb Drive!
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, I believe that all this wonderment stems back from the days that M$ ran everything and there was no "CLOUD". And it's not even VB either it's VBA, a special flavour of Basic with elements borrowed form VBScript and VB itself. The old Excel files did not even use any of these standards but relied on their own Macro language. But wait it gets better, you can not run the same piece of code in Excel as you could in Access and forget about turning your really cool access forms into stand alone apps or worse yet web forms. Any non wizard produced piece of code will have to be re-written. There very good reasons why MSCE are well paid, they are the only ones who can keep track of this mess.
Personally, I like to use a thumb drive and my own web hosting service. Data should be kept in databases, not spreadsheets, they break too easily... But then again I am a DBA / Web Developer at heart.
Yeah, I remember the good 'ol days of macro "sheets" in Excel. I even wrote macros for that other spreadsheet company at one time. Still, browsers are the OS of the cloud and JavaScript is the language of browsers so it seems like a perfect fit to me.
ReplyDeleteAs for the thumb drive, I agree and would even go one better: Portable Apps thumb drive! But you still risk data corruption or loosing the drive. Whereas the cloud should protect me from ever loosing data (Google going bankrupt aside).