Writing a web application in excel? Why not?

Question

Before you start flaming, I'm going to tell you that I am trying to convince myself that this is a bad idea.

Basically, I'm trying to create a website with some basic accounting functions. My friend, a consultant who only knows excel, asked if this could be an excel spreadsheet instead of a web interface.

I found myself thinking, why is excel not the better tool in this case? It has all the tools a web2.0 app has (scripting, access to a db, basic formatting), and is made for accounting. You could basically use excel to write a program that fetches data from an SQL database, populates some cells, and use formulas for the rest.

Is there precedent to using excel as one would use the browser to make an ajax-y web2 app?

Why is this a bad idea?

Update: just to clarify I meant this to be more a "rhetorical" discussion. I'm not sure why the rest of the message didn't clarify that...

Answer 1

Well, if you made it in excel, then it wouldn't really be a web application. It would be an Excel application.

Not that that's a bad thing though. If it makes more sense to build the app in Excel, then go for it.

The problems you'll have doing it in Excel will be the same as the problems you run into with any desktop vs. web application. For example, How do you handle deploying new versions of the app? How do you handle updating the app for new (or older) versions of Excel? etc.

ETA:

If you want to avoid the bugginess of Excel VBA and the headaches of managing a desktop application, you might want to look into the Google Spreadsheets API. You can use it to create/update Google docs spreadsheets on the fly, including formulas and lots of other spreadsheet goodness. Using a hybrid of web application and Google Spreadsheets might give you the best of both worlds, depending on what exactly you need to do.

Answer 2

After years of programming in Excel-VBA, the best answer that I can give you for not doing this:

Excel-VBA is buggy! It is probably the most bug-filled app that Microsoft has produced. It's great for some tasks, but forcing it to do a job for which it was never intended will lead to trouble.

I have a few spreadsheets that do similar things, (things Bill never intended), and without exception, they teeter on the brink of failure, and tend to crash with only the slightest provocation.

Sure, you can do it, but the headache is not worth it.