I was reading about Resolver quite often, mostly on planet python. I had made a mental memo to try it out for my self sometime but always seemed to be delaying it. I tried it out yesterday i was really impressed by the concept.
With Resolver you have a spreadsheet with tightly integrated python programmability. The window has 3 panes. The ‘spreadsheet’ pane, the Python editor, and the ‘output’ pane. You can define any python function you like and make it available for use in your spreadsheet. This means you can do database connectivity using python, or advanced data manipulation that is either no possible with Excel, or very difficult. I can’t tell you how many times i wished i could do that easily with Excel. In fact, i very often needed to pull data from the database of a Django project and do some manipulation using Excel , and present it to some users. But i wanted to use the Django ORM instead of raw SQL. With Resolver it should be very easy.
At least for me, it was often the case that i needed to solve a problem that was too complex for Excel, and too simple for writing a full-blown application. I needed something that would combine the best of both worlds.
Resolver is written in IronPython and uses Python for programming. It might be possible to run it using mono but i haven’t tried anything of the sort. Ironpython supposedly runs on linux , but mono has an incomplete Forms implmementation.
Best of all, it free for non-commercial use, so you need to try it out.