I'm wondering if anybody here has been faced with moving something from a spreadsheet into an app and what your experience was like in terms of how users liked it. I'm especially curious if you didn't get a bunch of people asking later, "Why don't you just put this out in a spreadsheet?"
When I hear people complain about their finances, I've developed an approach that seems to address a lot of the things that underlie their complaints.
I have been using Excel to track my expenses and help with budgeting for several years and I am thinking of how I could package it up and offer it to others.
There are some things I'd like to see that I can't do in my version of Excel (or couldn't when I tried) and other things that are just cumbersome because of how spreadsheets work.
That is to say, there are things that work in one version / platform of one spreadsheet app but not in others. (For example, I use a Mac, and for many release cycles, Excel for Mac did not support conditional macros. It did at one point, then Microsoft removed that support; they may have put it back in again. Now they have both web-based and platform-based versions and they don't have the exact same feature set. I have no idea how Google Sheets or OpenOffice compare, but I'm guessing they're not exactly the same either.)
So I'm not sure that just publishing it as a spreadsheet, or instructions on using a spreadsheet, wouldn't result in a nightmare of support tickets, unless I targeted a "common subset" of features that I know work (today) on all of the most popular tools (which would probably force me to remove several nice features).
A Good Thing about a spreadsheet is that you can enter and edit data right in the cells, although I'm not sure how much of a benefit that is in this case over a little popup form that lets you just "Add/Edit an Item". I know it's possible to set up grids in Delphi that allow you to edit cells directly, so that can be side-stepped if desired.
One Bad Thing about spreadsheets is that when you add or delete rows, sometimes formulas get messed up and you have to fix them. There's also no way to organize notes "on the side" easily. (The area to the right of my monthly grids has become flooded with notes that don't really fit well in a grid structure.)
I'm curious what others think who've been faced with this situation before....