If you're fine with hosted applications (SaaS) then both Notion and AirTable kind of mix spreadsheets and databases together. Notion does it while being mainly a wiki while AirTable does it while mainly being a spreadsheet.

I’m not, but thanks.

Have you used the data model features in newer versions of Excel? I haven't really used them myself (I generally keep all my code in SQL and just use Excel as a frontend) but my impression is that Microsoft is trying to do exactly that. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-Data-Model...

I’ve never really get very at home with Excel. I’ve used Lotus Improv, Quantrix Modeler, Apple Numbers and XCubes.

Then again I’ve got to the point where I build my balance sheets and profit & loss accounts as Python objects...

I’m working on a desktop app in this space right now. Bridging the gap between Excel and SQL, or between the business analyst and the developer. Alpha version should be ready at the weekend.

It seems like every company I’ve worked at is populated by business analysts who pull Excel spreadsheets together, often in half baked or inconsistent formats, and then pass it onto the dev team with something along the lines of "Can you update the database with this. We’ve spent days putting it together."

My app lets you generate custom SQL per row in an Excel file where certain conditions are met, auto populating the SQL based on specified columns in the Excel data.

Me too! I started working on a proof of concept for this but lost steam https://github.com/timwis/dataface

Looks interesting!

I had something like a SQLite backend with a full spreadsheet front with all the usual functions plus SQL queries etc. all in a local application. Kind of like MS Access if it had Excel bolted onto its front.

I really like Apple’s Numbers and I’ve always thought that adding a database backend and support for Pivot tables and iterative solutions would make it into a real powerhouse.

https://podio.com/ seems to nail this. I used it around 6-7 years ago and it was awesome! Seems like they were bought by citrix :O

There are a few SaaS products I've seen that do this, like https://basedash.io/

Isn't this similar to phpmyadmin with a much polished interface? what am I missing?

Isn't this airtable?

Tableau does this

notion.so