That’s true right now. I think it will be addressed in the future though.

To put it another way, there is no online equivalent of Crystal Reports. The closest we get are weak web query tools that are built into some enterprise apps.

On a different note, the one advantage I had hoped for in the thin app that has not materialized is speed. It’d be pretty sweet if I could load up a calc-intensive sheet onto the online app and let all the processing power the cloud could muster shoot out an answer as quick as a page refresh. Instead, doing it online is about a s speedy as doing it on a 512MB Vista box.

On the plus side, at least the thin guys are constantly improving. All fatty Excel has given me over the past 7 years is 2 steps forward 10 steps back.

It’s not strictly fat vs thin anymore. The advent of Ajax and similar web/javascript technologies added a lot of “fat” to thin and Microsoft has been adding “thin” (online components) to fat. The web allows easy trial, distribution, collaboration and instant updates of software — it also typically carries a low monthly price tag or no price tag at all.

Yeah, sure, Microsoft is doing so many things at the same time. They have a gazillion incompatible APIs for data access, and keep coming with new ones every year.

As for storing stuff on the server, do you know that with the new so-called XML file formats, Microsoft is trying to get you to store a cache of your data inside files (they call this : Custom XML parts) ? With that in hands, do you think Microsoft is right headed or not, I mean from a data confidentiality stand point?

The only way I could possibly see this flying is if the online spreadsheet was sold as a product, not a service, and hosted directly on corporate servers. This kind of sounds like the direction MS is headed, so I would expect Excel would be a part of that in some form anyway.

Consider long term. Not only supporting offline is a minor technical challenge, but you can see that it’s obvious that web browsers, and mobile-based web browsers to a larger extent, are now carrying runtime execution environments, such as compiled Javascript, or Silverlight’s .NET. Both of these can support a debug/edit window which will be the exact replica of today’s VBA IDE.

So what’s your point against online spreadsheets exactly?

The era of fat MS Excel is dead.

Consider long term. Not only supporting offline is a minor technical challenge, but you can see it that it’s obvious that web browsers, and mobile-based web browsers to a larger extent, are now carrying runtime execution environments, such as compiled Javascript, or Silverlight’s .NET. Both of these can support a debug/edit window which will be the exact replica of today’s VBA IDE.

So what’s your point against online spreadsheets exactly?

If you don’t think the fat Excel is dead, keep dreaming. This era is dead.

As for privacy, security and accessibility, certainly accessibility in terms of offline use favors fat client software and locally stored files. But in terms of multiple possible users, web-based spreadsheets on thin clients are clear winners, no?

Privacy is only as good as user account passwords for the web-based services. For fat clients, privacy is only as good as the difficulty of stealing disks/computers. How many of you know someone who’s had a laptop stolen?

Security of fat clients is more a question of controls on users. If a disaffected employee could write client databases to removable media, how secure are companies’ files? Given the regular news reports of lost or stolen customer/taxpayer records, how less secure would society be if such data could be accessed from any web-connected computer over encrypted channels and only after authenticating nontrivial user credentials?

On-site data storage is no guarantee of security or privacy, and accessibility means many different, sometimes incompatible things.

Again, the comparison of current era fat vs thin clients to dumb mainframe terminals vs PCs of 20 years ago is just plain wrong. Besides, the uncontrolled, isolated PCs of the late 1980s and early 1990s didn’t win. Controlled PCs connected to relatively dumb servers did. Yes, PCs can still work even without their network connections, but when disconnected they do a lot less of all they’re used for now than they did even 10 years ago. But the key change over the last decade is that servers have become much smarter, and server-based software will continue to improve at a faster rate than fat client software going forward.

The only thing that might alter this is wholesale improvement in fat client software, meaning smaller, faster, more accurate, more tailored features. You know, software that converts 100-fold or so improvement in hardware processing speed into 10-fold improvement in user-perceived software processing speed. That would require a rather thoroughgoing revolution in software development, not least within Microsoft itself. That is, a decision NOT to add features but to improve the performance of existing features. Like that’ll happen.

If you want to show someone a data layout / formula or ask for help on this site (or any of the other great spreadsheet help resources) then just add a link to your post.

There are still a lot of missing features, but the apps are already a lot better than they were just 6 months ago.

I think that fat clients will be the mainstay for many years to come, but 10 or 20 years down the line, who knows…

Telecomm bandwidth, price and availability
Hardware Prices
The price of software

The first two are driven ever faster and cheaper by Moores Law.

But MSofts dominant position tends to push the price of SW in the opposite direction.

We have probably already reached the crossover point.
This is an unstable situation that cannot last for long without Cloud and/or FOSS changing it.