Thanks for the kind words about our website and screencast. I completely understand where you are coming from in your post; Strata won’t be for everybody. In fact, I think many folks might find a table-to-csv Firefox extension more than adequate for their occasional “wow, I’d like to sort this table” needs.

However, Strata will have more of an impact in areas such as:

A) Corporate analytics. This will affect people who need to work with more data than a spreadsheet can handle, plug in directly to a centralized database or work with otherwise static HTML files (or csv files) provided via, say, a BI system on the corporate intranet.

B) Rapid analytics development/mashups. This will let people develop quick scripts/extensions to create custom data apps — which can get even more interesting when you also plug in data from the web (not just HTML tables, but also web APIs, etc.).

Our current marketing is definitely a little heavy on the “open up HTML files and mess with them” to the exclusion of many other areas, which was, for better or worse, a result of us wanting to get a beta out sooner rather than later. We’ll be building on this in the coming weeks, particularly in the realm of building apps and manipulating/querying the web. The really big thing we need to add are solid examples of how Strata can be used to do “real life” things. This is in process.

Given your experience working with data, I’d invite you to pop on by in a month or so and see if there is anything else that you may find valuable. Thanks!

All the best,
Ken Kaczmarek
Kirix

Seems you were much more happy with the smaller tool to just copy-paste into Excel. Maybe there could be some other tool that does simple and common operations on tables in the web, like quickly give you the sum of a column within a few clicks without having to write any formulas.