No Brainer - Post to Excel Blog from Excel
It seems obvious that I should be posting about Excel from Excel, why not? However, I’m not sure of the details yet.
My blogging software accepts posting by email, so I may devise a way to post to this blog from Excel by sending an email from Excel. Or possibly just connect directly to the MySQL database from Excel? I’m not sure how to synch up a picture upload with either scenario, so possibly just quick notes.
But enough about me…
…what about you? I’ll get to a practical idea shortly, but first:
Let’s assume I create this “addin” for Excel that allows me to post to this blog, couldn’t I then let you download the addin and post to this blog? Not that I want tons of people posting here, but we could use another domain name, and make it 100% ad free so people are the most comfortable sharing. You could then view the thoughts and notes of Excel users, about Excel, while they actually work in Excel. Almost like del.icio.us, however our bookmarks are Excel notes, and our application is Excel and not the browser.
And the practical idea(maybe:-)
While thinking about posting tips and notes from inside Excel to the web, I thought of the question “What would be the exact opposite of this?”, and the answer was “Ask a question from inside Excel”. (taking instead of giving)
Why haven’t the forum owners or the newsgroups evolved to this model, tried it, or made it an alternative method of using their sites?(maybe they have?) Why does somebody have to drop all trains of thought and leave Excel, launch their browser, log onto their forum, ask a question, and then keep returning to the site to look for an answer?
Maybe a better solution would be an Excel addin that would allow you to ask a question from within Excel, send it off into space and you could continue working, when an answer was provided it would automagically alert you(rss?), and finally let you view the answer or respond to it from within Excel.
Start from scratch? Hack the discussion server front end(which I’ve never used)? Expose a forum as a web service and build a forum smart client addin?
Conclusion
-These ideas may or may not be intelligible, completely formed, or come to fruition.
-These ideas could probably be applied to any desktop app, not only Excel.
-Just kicking some ideas around and thought I’d share.
November 20th, 2004 at 3:31 pm
This is not as expansive as you propose, but it does put Google on the Help menu:
Google Search Add-in for Excel / Word / PowerPoint
November 22nd, 2004 at 2:39 am
Hello Doug,
More likely than not, none of this is new, I share it for the one it may be new to. And I suppose I like to hear myself type occasionally:->
I’d agree, the google addin is very nice, and similar in concept with my rambling, thanks for noting it.
November 22nd, 2004 at 5:43 pm
Yep, I was bummed when I saw Doug had beaten me to mentioning Ron’s great addin. But that has a well defined place in the Excel UI. I’m not sure blogging or email addins would really be extending the interface in a productive way, since there are already dedicated programs to do that. Sure, an automated email notification has its place. But pretty soon we’re using the wrong wrent to pound in the wrong screw, eh?
November 25th, 2004 at 5:47 am
if you look on j -walk i thinik there is a post abou some one who does a blog using excel:
I have seen excel used to FTP stuff upto the web, which ccould also be usefull for you: