On 6 June, Jon Bultmeyer, on the topic of Goggle’s spreadsheet, said:

…imagine you migrate your spreadsheets into the Google cloud because you want to share them live, which creates demand for others to have gmail accounts.” Now once you have the spreadsheet there, imagine formulas that want to keep your content there like

=search($A$1)

=rss(“http://foo.com/bar.xml”)

=flickr(“http://flickr/tag/foss”)

=webservice(“http://salesforce.com/mycustomers”, “custid”, $A$1)

=video(…)

=map(geocode($A$1))

in other words, formulas don’t have to live in within your machine, they can be resolved in the cloud. So is this the Everyman’s application- as-potential-AJAX-mashup-platform?

I think this is right on; I’m not sure if he’s joking about the Excel spreadsheet formula syntax, but that’s what people understand.

I have a very specific use case in mind for Enterprise Web 2.0, which consists of a business analyst mailing around spreadsheets and I’m sure it’s consistent from company to company. It would be fantastically useful for them to be able to call external services using something simple and familiar like Excel formulas. A lot of times, people use Excel *just* for presentation, which is absurd, of course, but they know how to do it.