Thread Subject: Re: FW: tables in wiki?

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From: Bailey Bruce
Date: Tue, Oct 31 2006 5:40 AM

I concur with Jared's observations and conclusions on this thread.
Further, I would argue the characterization of "a bit difficult to use"
for WikiText and "friendly enough for non-techie users" for spreadsheets
is only accurate because: (1) the former is new (the concept of
"markup" is alien to most people, but it is how all the early word
processors worked and not really hard); (2) Some people, not all, have
invested a great deal of time and effort to learning how to use MS
Office applications.

It is perfectly reasonable and natural to want to leverage that invested
time. I would, however, hazard the reasonable guess that the number of
people who can create a well formatted spreadsheet from scratch but
cannot master WikiText in less than two hours to be vanishing small.
Many of us have first hand knowledge of people who use assistive
technology who find using spreadsheets to be onerous. Having worked
mainstreamed technical support, my suspicion is that the comfort level
with spreadsheets among non-assistive technology users is similar, but
they are better at covering their ignorance and frustrations.

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