Replacing spreadsheets by Python and the browser

[markolopa]

Hello,

Could you please recommend me a Python tool that could help me to get
rid of the messy information and scripts I have in spreadsheets?

Spreadsheets are great for having simple things done quickly. But as
the needs grow their limitations can be quite frustrating. I would
like to use the browser to edit information that for the moment I
store in spreadsheets.

I believe that the perfect tool for me would be that a combination a
table editing tool and a tree navigation tool. I would like to
navigate in a tree, expanding and collapsing nodes. The leaf nodes
would then be tables with some editable columns.

A good table editing tool (without the tree navigation) would already
be very helpful.

Examples of information I would store in such a tree/table system
(which are now in spreasheets):
- My dvd, avi collection: The tree would be the directory tree of the
file system where I store my movies. For each directory containing the
avis or the dvds there would be a table with one movie by row and
several editable columns: the file name, the genre, the year, whether
I have seen it or not, comments, etc.
. The same thing for mp3.
- My family budget. The tree would be the account tree, the rows in
the table would be the deposits and withdrwals. This is actually my
most important need. I don't find gnucash flexible enough for my
needs. Beancount (http://furius.ca/beancount/) has a great html
output, but I would like to use the browser also for input.

I am very comfortable with Python, but I don't know much about web
framewords and javascript interfaces. I am ready to learn anything
that could help me to do the desired tasks quickly, without having to
code a web application from scratch. Is javascript the way to go? In
this case is there a Python lib can I use on the server side? Could a
tool like django be helpful? Pyjamas? Both a single machine or a
client-server architecture are fine for me.

Thanks a lot in advance for all suggestion,
Marko

[rusi]

May not be what you are asking for but you may want to look at
orgmode:

http://orgmode.org/

[Andrea Crotti]

Well my answer is not really python-related, but one tool that really
changed my life is orgmode
http://orgmode.org/

It does almost everything you ask and a 1000 other things.
If you want to go with a python project, in general you should probably
need a lot of javascript
to have something which is nice and easy to use, and yes something like
django would work.

[pyt...@bdurham.com]

Check out ResolverOne
http://www.resolversystems.com

Malcolm