What UI design makes sense when the userbase is obsessed with spreadsheets

Question

In the first iteration of the software I am working on, we wrote tons of js to simulate an excel spreadsheet like experience. Now the users are not happy with the amount of scrolling they have to do. Their favorite UI is excel spreadsheet. I am wondering what kind of UI would provide a win win situation for the dev team and easy to grasp for the users. Userbase is people who do number crunching day in and day out. Ajaxy UI did not fly well with them initially. App is supposed to handle large amount of tabular data.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

EDIT: The data is provided via different services that the user analyzes, provides comments, make adjustments and calculations before the data is persisted in application specific db.

Sauls

A facetious comment, but I think they want this. You know Google is probably doing it right. – Rain

I was the first to recommend this solution :P.. even excel activex components got shot down..however I will add more info to the question to address this. – Sauls

I currently have the same problem. Company only ever used excel, and wants the software to behave like excel. Had to resort to tables with lots of text inputs. Kind of a pain. – Latinity

If you're looking more for a UI design that meets the needs and not a specific technical solution, you may want to try asking on ui.stackexchange.com. – Biological

Answer 1

I use this (heavily modified though).

Besides, there are a lot of customisable options.

http://www.trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Mehetabel

Answer 2

Datagrid library (http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGrid/index.shtml) is pretty solid, provides all of the functionality you're after. And the best part - you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Stupefacient

There is a possibility of having nested grids in a column. Will this take care of it ? – Sauls

Do you mean a pivot table? There are a ton of sample uses, dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGrid/samples/index.html – Stupefacient

Answer 3

My advice is to use Adobe Flex for your client-side UI. Some high-level advantages of flex:

• Browser compatibility: any browser with a flash player will run the site (currently over 90% I believe). No need to fudge with html/css.
• Data binding: the flex framework's strongest suit is dynamic scalable data binding. Also, their data grids are the strongest I've encountered, without sorting, rearranging, resizing, pagination, etc... right out of the box.
• Server-side technology: Flex can couple with any server-side technology for back-end operations (Java, PHP, RESTful web services, and Coldfusion to name a few)
• Open source: flex is open source (however, buying the eclipse-based Flash Builder is usually a good idea)
• Customization: every flex component is completely customizable and skinnable. Nice for business apps that do not want to simply look the same as everyone else.
• Desktop: Using Adobe AIR Desktop Environment users can interact with the OS.

Whether

All of those things are true of javascript as well. :) – Stupefacient

we are not looking at introducing a technology at this time. We are a MS Shop and if it had to be anything RIA, Silverlight will be chosen for sure. Not undermining Flex in anyway. – Sauls

How about Excel with VBA? – Roer