Patrick,

I'm using Django right now for my in-house Finance department to "bulk"
edit multiple items. You'd be surprised how I'm doing it, though. I'm
generating an XML file and letting the user download it from the
website... Then they use Excel for the "bulk editing", save again as
XML, and repost back to the server. I'll document blog/this when I'm
done. I *could* try to emulate the bulk editing features of a
spreadsheet with something like TrimSpreasheet
(http://trimpath.com/project/wiki/TrimSpreadsheet), and I hope to do
that someday... but those "real world" finance dept. employees prefer
the Excel interface... So "let them have cake", I say! By limiting the
use of Excel to its strong GUI features for bulk editing (filters,
sorting, searching, etc). I get the best of both worlds. And after the
users are done, the results get posted back to a nice, clean,
normalized relational database. No yucky spreadsheet files with
massively important un-auditable data lying around on everyone's hard
drives. Everyone's happy, and best of all Django makes this pretty darn
easy to do, with the help of ElementTree for the XML.

- Jason
(First posted as a reply
here-->http://www.jacobian.org/2006/jan/27/why-django/ )

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