Comment by halfcat

I always wonder where these spreadsheet/database apps will land. Usually it falls flat for one of a few reasons I’ve observed:

- Fundamental gap in skillset, in that if you want to have ultimate flexibility to slice and dice the data and report on whatever you’re seeking, you’ve ultimately needed SQL skills in the past (which isn’t rocket science, but also isn’t something most accounting users can run with on their own).

- Fundamental desire of users to work with unstructured data. This goes back at least as far as Excel vs Lotus Improv in the early 90’s. Joel Spolsky talked about this, how they were terrified that Lotus Improv was going to kill Excel, because Improv was built to work with structured data, which users could then query and ask questions of to get any answer they want. But it turned out, as they observed people using both apps, there were zero users that used 100% normalized, structure data.

- Imperfect translation between spreadsheet and database. I’ve seen these work well 99.9% of the time, but at some point a column gets added or something that throws off formulas. And 0.1% error is basically catastrophic in accounting.

Maybe LLMs help overcome these challenges. Wish you luck.