Replacing spreadsheets by Python and the browser

[Andrea Crotti]

On 10/02/2011 06:36 PM, markolopa wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Could you please recommend me a Python tool that could help me to get
> rid of the messy information and scripts I have in spreadsheets?
>
> Spreadsheets are great for having simple things done quickly. But as
> the needs grow their limitations can be quite frustrating. I would
> like to use the browser to edit information that for the moment I
> store in spreadsheets.
>
> I believe that the perfect tool for me would be that a combination a
> table editing tool and a tree navigation tool. I would like to
> navigate in a tree, expanding and collapsing nodes. The leaf nodes
> would then be tables with some editable columns.
>
> A good table editing tool (without the tree navigation) would already
> be very helpful.
>
> Examples of information I would store in such a tree/table system
> (which are now in spreasheets):
> - My dvd, avi collection: The tree would be the directory tree of the
> file system where I store my movies. For each directory containing the
> avis or the dvds there would be a table with one movie by row and
> several editable columns: the file name, the genre, the year, whether
> I have seen it or not, comments, etc.
> . The same thing for mp3.
> - My family budget. The tree would be the account tree, the rows in
> the table would be the deposits and withdrwals. This is actually my
> most important need. I don't find gnucash flexible enough for my
> needs.  Beancount (http://furius.ca/beancount/) has a great html
> output, but I would like to use the browser also for input.
>
> I am very comfortable with Python, but I don't know much about web
> framewords and javascript interfaces. I am ready to learn anything
> that could help me to do the desired tasks quickly, without having to
> code a web application from scratch. Is javascript the way to go? In
> this case is there a Python lib can I use on the server side? Could a
> tool like django be helpful? Pyjamas? Both a single machine or a
> client-server architecture are fine for me.
>
> Thanks a lot in advance for all suggestion,
> Marko


Well my answer is not really python-related, but one tool that really 
changed my life is orgmode
http://orgmode.org/

It does almost everything you ask and a 1000 other things.
If you want to go with a python project, in general you should probably 
need a lot of javascript
to have something which is nice and easy to use, and yes something like 
django would work.