Spreadsheets as Databases - Google thinks it's OK
February 11th, 2008
Have you ever been shown a ‘database’ by somebody who doesn’t really know what a database is? You know it’s going to go badly when showing it, they double-click on an Excel file and you are confronted with a grid with ‘Name’, ‘Address1’, ‘City’, etc. across the top and a huge number of rows below.
Given that most people use spreadsheets like databases in that way, it was only a matter of time before one of the big online spreadsheet applications promoted it as a feature. And so it came to pass.
Seth thinks this is great but I’m not so sure. In a sense, it allows for gathering of data for analysis at a quantitative level, but at the same time it breaks the line between polling, database work and spreadsheet crunching in a way that might confuse more people than it will help.
Perhaps on the other hand it’ll help stop us thinking about applications and more about data. We are moving towards an era where we care about who and what more than the how and detail of collecting the data.
databases 
google apps 
polling 
questionnaires 
spreadsheets
