Spreadsheets were a revolutionary tool, but I've grown distrustful of any information that isn't available in plaintext format. Is there a "CSV Markup Language" of some sort that would let you do some of the fancy display work that you can do in Excel?
GNU Recutils: A Plaintext database format
"Recutils is a collection of tools, like recins, recdel, and recsel used to manage these recfiles/databases. They allow for all the normal basic relational database operations, typing, auto-incrementing, and even field-level crypto. All of this power is yours with the bonus that your database is a human-readable text file that you can grep/awk/sed freely"
