Finally Adobe got a spreadsheet companion to Buzzword word processor. The name is in popular today form of two word compound “Adobe Tables“. You could start reading here

Here is my summary of +/- -ses:

“+”

1. Nice design

2. Intuitive workflow (for example, how you add columns and rows)

3. Quite robust (I’ve tried to stress-test it a little bit and it still was ok after all tortures )

Except the fact that it’s “Preview” version and it’s missing many features that should be there (like cell-level formatting or charts), there are some significant architectural drawbacks:

“-”

1. This is not spreadsheet application – it’s a data entering/presentation application. The difference is that we use spreadsheets not for creating our shopping to-do lists and family budgets but for so called spreadsheet calculations. In other words, we use formulas a lot. Spreadsheet computational model is very productive for financial and scientific models, for example. One could say that MS Excel is “Data => Knowledge” tool, while Adobe Tables is more for visualization. So Adobe follows that “Data importance” fallacy. After all, very few people can understand raw data and interpret it.

2. Do we need another to-do list application, contact list etc? Blist.com tried to achieve something like that and apparently they failed and moved to “data storage” concept. I guess that Adobe Tables was not created by people who use spreadsheets for many years to make money

3. Integration with MS Excel is crucial: it should be some kind of export/import. The application should be able to display Excel files.

4.  It’s for end users only, I see no way how not-Adobe developers could make use of it – it’s not a component.

5. (Implementation detail) Data presentation for client<->server is very sparse (some kind of HTML). It’s not important for small files however but could be a show stopper for big ones.

Frankly speaking Adobe doesn’t tell that it’s a spreadsheet application, just lookalike. But I got people asking me and comparing Adobe Tables to Idubee Flex spreadsheet application so I felt kinda pressed to write this

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