Via John, I spotted Wikicalc, from Dan Bricklin, one of the original creators of Visicalc.

The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.

wikiCalc is a standalone browser application (packaged as a Win32 executable that runs a local web server), rather than a component of a larger authoring experience.

What’s I’d really to see would like to see would be lightweight table editing and manipulation built into the wiki management software itself, taking advantage of AJAX to provide a fast experience for interacting with semi-structured data.

Imagine if you could create and update and sort and filter your email address book or your Googlebase data as easily as you do an Excel spreadsheet, for example.

Done right, this could equal the scope of Visicalc’s impact in the changing the way people interact with semistructured data on the web.

At Jobster, we use Confluence maintain everything from feature lists to our ping pong ladder, and we experience pain editing and interacting with tables..

I wrote an Excel Macro called Excel To Confluence to automatically create the wiki markup from an excel spreadsheet, but having to work with data in a separate and slow to launch program is a pain.

I know that Microsoft has been working to web enable past versions of Office, but their focus is the intranet and Windows rather than an internet component. Think AJAX versus DHTML, GMail versus Outlook web access.

As Sergei Brin said,

I don’t really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say can we do the minicomputer on the Web on AJAX makes sense. I’m not saying that’s what [Microsoft] Office is, I’m just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that’s what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more.