Spreadsheets are brilliant, you can use a spreadsheet to do anything basically.

Its very useful to be able to add a new sheet which is basically the equivalent of a new document on a tab.

The suggestion here is that the "new sheet" can be a text document format. So for example you could make the first tab be a cover page, the second and third tabs be your spreadsheets full of data and calculations, and the fourth tab be a 27 page text document with commentary and instructions.
-- pocmloc, Jun 17 2020

Patrick's Parabox https://www.youtube...watch?v=N7yvUiSKYjg
Recursive Puzzler [zen_tom, Jun 18 2020]

There's various note-taking formats, like Microsoft's OneNote that aim to provide a seamless container format for components of other Office applications. I can see the benefits, but the downside is you end up with a great big monolithic hybrid monstrosity that ties you into a subscription type model for as long as you can keep drinking the medicine.

I prefer these days using a Jupyter Notebook to run code that references data from very low-fi data sources (csv, text files etc) and visualises that in some presentable wrapper. That way, if the underlying data changes, I don't have to save/copy a new version of the notebook, just keep the code and get it to spit out another pdf, or html document (that's if I'm forced to send out documents, rather than just do a screenshare over a call, in which case, a live notebook session with inline images, tables etc will do just as well - I've seen brave people do extremely engaging presentations to 000's of people using just a Jupyter Notebook, running code "live" and talking through the results )

Yes, there's potential issues with upgrades to the underlying code (python mostly for me) so there is a bit of instability sometimes when reviewing old work but that's offset by being able to run across multiple OSs and not having to pay for anything. This problem isn't unique to notebooks - but at least the underlying data, if in some ancient and stable format like csv will never go obsolete, or need a code-tweak to access it. Separating data from function is a big deal, and for me the main reason never to use regular spreadsheets unless absolutely necessary.
-- zen_tom, Jun 17 2020


What the wise one said above me ^...hahahaha, since I've no clue whatsoever what he said. I'm just following the leader.
-- blissmiss, Jun 17 2020


I think this goes in the wrong direction. I'd like a hybrid spreadsheet where every cell could contain an entire document, or even another spreadsheet, which itself could be populated with documents and spreadsheets, ad infinitum. Recursive spreadsheets.

For that matter, I also crave recursive post-it notes. Each post-it should be covered in miniature sticky notes, that can be re-arranged making the post-it into its own self-contained noticeboard. Recursive trello.
-- mitxela, Jun 18 2020


Couldn't this be achieved by printing out a word document and spreadsheet and putting the papers in the order you want them?

You can already put spreadsheets in word documents.
-- chronological, Jun 18 2020


//hybrid spreadsheet where every cell could contain an entire document// //recursive spreadsheets//

Which is one reason I'm such a fan of say running python over a Jupyter Notebook interface. It's perfectly possible to build a spreadsheet (in pandas for example) whose cells contain the full text (or even raw bytes) culled from other documents, be they news articles, excel spreadsheets, images, pdf documents, internet links or movie files. You can then write functions to work on that information and apply formulas like you might in an excel spreadsheet. The interface is programmatic, which frees you up from some of the difficulties of being fixed to a visual interface - though if you ever want it visual, you can look at a tabular view, or generate a plot, or whatever.

Recursive post-its would be cool - and somehow reminds me of a recently released puzzle game (linked)
-- zen_tom, Jun 18 2020


That's a lovely puzzle game. There is something infinitely appealing about recursion.
-- mitxela, Jun 19 2020


^True, looks intriguing. If recursion is a fundamental of universal structure, there has to be some sort of state change between scales. The larger has to be an emergent ghost of the smaller or for that matter, the other way may work as well.

Does data rely on attributes of presentation? Tying data to specialised presentation will limit the number of views. Universal access needs a ubiquitous base system, no matter how the colouring in is done.
-- wjt, Jun 20 2020


What [mitxela] said.
-- pertinax, Jun 20 2020


hmm, on first look, I like the general idea. I never used one note etc, but it makes sense that you could integrate office so that you could have a word doc, spreadsheet and perhaps both of those feeding a powerpoint stack. All these could be accessible from the tabs. Then, I thought, well, that's just sort of moving the start menu up a little. And for that reason the integration exists to an extent. The disadvantage for me would be that for some reason, on my shiny new PC, excel causes hard faults every few minutes. I mean, they've had a while to get it right.

If you want to achieve the same effect, well, Excel has had enough mission creep that it's an OK text editor. You have all the alignment options, font options, size, bold, underline etc. You can just expand one cell to 1 page in dimensions, set format to "text" and you're good to go. There's even a spell check via: "review>proofing>spelling".
-- bs0u0155, Jun 22 2020



random, halfbakery