I’m sure everybody who builds web applications uses grids to display data. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but you might not realize that you’re increasing the customers expectations to an unreachable level:
Yes, all very nice and well, but can’t you make that thing work like Excel?
My first thought is always something like: “sure, if you supply us with the budget that the Excel team has”, but in practice we’ll always end up buying one of those bloated grid components or hacking our own solution where the customers is never 100% happy (because it still doesn’t work like Excel).
The solution?
Don’t format the data in a grid, but in a nicely formatted list and stay away from anything that resembles column headers. Add some simple search and filter options and people are happy.
Another solution is to use a RIA like Adobe’s flex. Their grid is almost excel like.
René
Depends on your definition of “excell like”.
Sortable/column dragable/Paginated datagrids dont have to be a pain at all with the right RIA framework (javascript/flash/silverlight).
If they want editable data grids with various controls in the cells ExtJS (amongst others) is a really good choice.
If they need excell’s reporting/formula functionality there needs might just entail a PivotGrid with precompiled OLAP data, devexpress’s pivotgrid goes even further and allows for a great deal of customization of the data on the client side.
If you render a data grid where you can’t do anything with the headers then yeah i wholeheartedly agree that a nicely formated list will feel way more finished to a client.
If they want a real time editable pivotgrid then they really want to use excell in the browser.