🚀 go-pugleaf

Here  is  why I need  a  swiss-army-knife   spreadsheet (actually most
spreadsheets already have some appropriate database functions, such as
sorting [although merging is a problem]):

I have a lot of academic (often hand-collected) databases where I have
to hand-change and hand-check values all the time.  Believe it or not:
I often stoop to using Emacs to store  this data.  With a spreadsheet,
I  could highlight/boldface questionable data,  browse through it, and
put comments  into column B  for the values in  column A. If I want to
extract values, I simply put
	zmesa s.mesa | cut -f1 | <other functionality handling data>

Spreadsheets are still   the easiest on-the-fly databases for   1-10MB
databases.  Statistical  packages    should   have a   lot   of   this
functionality,  but  unfortunately they do not.   As  to alternatives,
dataphile    is       too      multi-media+report     rather      than
alpha-numerically+storage oriented,  and more   expensive  (factor 6).
SAS is even more expensive and much less user-friendly.

Finally, although there  are   non-trivial implementation  issues   to
consider for how to save tabular text, my requested feature is trivial
to add, because I  want exactly the same output  as that produced by a
"SAVE  TO ASCII/Export-to-tabular-text"  command,   a part  of   EVERY
spreadsheet   package, including Mesa.    I  bet Athena   Design could
repackage the relevant code into a stand-alone program in one hour.

If you agree, here is Athena's e-mail address: feedback@athena.com

/ivo

PS: Also, with a command-line interface, I could invent new uses, such
as the ability to read spreadsheets into GNU Emacs.