Hi all,

I'm an actuary who works in Excel most of the day. Excel is an extremely impressive program in many ways, but I have some opinions on the possible design of a spreadsheet that modifies the Visicalc-style flat grid paradigm. Two main ideas are first that the spreadsheet should concentrate on explanation and "self-documentation" rather than calculation, and second that a hierarchical format would work better for many applications.

If anyone is interested in more details, please see the short summary I wrote at http://www.emerose.org/explicans/explicans.html

I'm posting here because I briefly looked through the code base of a few open source spreadsheets and KSpread seemed to have the cleanest and easiest code. So, if I wanted to take a crack at implementing my ideas, do you think modifying KSpread would be the best way to do that? Or is starting from scratch probably a better idea? Or, best yet, is there some other structured open source spreadsheet or project that has done most of my work for me?

Also, if anyone wants to comment on the thoughts on my web page, or has other ideas about the nature of spreadsheets or financial models, etc., I would love to hear it.

Thanks,
Ben