Using Excel (Or Calc) as a web-app frontend or embedded widget

Question

Problem: When dealing with web-applications that require grid-based input (but is not a fullblown spreadsheet like Google's) there is a common problem. Either the web-GUI sucks, or it is tied behind some heavily-specialized API that takes way too much training and time to use effectively (not to mention the price tag tends to be high for these kinds of things).

Question: Assuming all the target users have Excel or OpenOffice (or can be told to get a copy) has anyone out there tried using a spreadsheet as an input form for a live web application?

Scenario: User X comes to your website, she gets to a page where she downloads a spreadsheet to continue some complex number crunching in the midst of using your webapp. When she is done, she presses a button on your specially constructed spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet itself submits its payload via POST to your website, then the website does whatever with the recently-crunched numbers.

Motivation: The motivation for this question stems from huge frustration with all the various "grid control" widgets out there for use in web pages. They either are not enough, or not sufficiently capable of being "embedded" as a control in a web page.

Answer 1

This is common practice for data-heavy intranet applications. In the past, you would have used VB for Applications. Today, the Open XML SDK offers a very elegant way of hooking into the open and close events of the document. Excel will execute your managed code upon open (to populate the spreadsheet) and upon close/save (to extract the data from the spreadsheet and write it back to the database). The Excel document can be served from a Web server that does not need to have Office installed.