Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

ironcalc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 238 posts

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#141

Post by usr1106 »

thezipcreator wrote: post #121

cool project, but I don't particularly like "The democratization of spreadsheets" as a catchphrase. Like, what does that even mean? If by "democratization" you mean like, more able to be used, well anyone can go download LibreOffice or for the web use CryptPad's Spreadsheets, and if you mean that it's more open, well both of those are open source. Is this project specifically run democratically or something? It just…

I think it's the general idea that free (as in speech) software is "democratic". Even if the project does not do what you want you can always modify or fork, i.e. make changes privately for your own use or even distribute them. Closed source software is like totalitarianism, the leader or leading party knows what is best for you.

Democracy is not the best analogy, free software projects have BDFLs. The difference is more indirect, in democracies citizens have rights and freedoms. In non-democracies typically less so.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#142

Post by nhatcher »

snthpy wrote: post #117

Awesome project! Looking forward to following this. I've been looking out for projects like this over the years and I'm glad to see that this one takes Excel compatibility seriously! Also love the choice of Rust and WASM! For me Dynamic Array support is a blocker and I can't play with it until you've got that. Very glad to see that's your top priority though[1]! That and everything in the Logical, Lookup and Referenc…

Thanks! Yes, that is exactly the top priority of the project right now.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#143

Post by hotbutterscotch »

nhatcher wrote: post #5

Hey! This is my project! Amazed to see this here. I'll try to answer questions people might have

Hey, sorry for the noob question. What is the use case for this. Is it to integrate into webpages for rendering data in spreadsheets/tables ?

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#144

Post by [deleted] »

anyfactor wrote: post #129

I was an excel enthusiast and studied accounting mainly for Excel. Although I have moved to programming unlike most I still do think Excel is awesome. I sincerely commend the enthusiasm, but working in the industry as the "excel expert", I think most outsider does not understand the "cult" aspect of Excel. Excel works. That is it. Trying to replace excel with anything will be percieved as replacing a calculator with…

[deleted]

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#145

Post by nhatcher »

snthpy wrote: post #118
snthpy wrote: post #117

Awesome project! Looking forward to following this. I've been looking out for projects like this over the years and I'm glad to see that this one takes Excel compatibility seriously! Also love the choice of Rust and WASM! For me Dynamic Array support is a blocker and I can't play with it until you've got that. Very glad to see that's your top priority though[1]! That and everything in the Logical, Lookup and Referenc…

What would be quite cool would be a small utility that one can run over ones workooks and that produces a csv or json file of all the Excel functions used and their count. People could submit those and you'd get real usage stats of what functions people actually use in real world workbooks rather than guessing. Users could also then use this to run a compatibility check to see if they could move over to your engine o…

Hi snthpy, that is planed! We used to have that, but I removed it to simplify the UI.

If you don't mind compiling yourself there is a somewhat rough tool tat does that:

https://github.com/ironcalc/IronCalc/blob/main/xlsx/src/bin/...

It will tell you exactly what cells evaluate differently.

I will also add mentions to unsupported formulas and features

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#146

Post by nhatcher »

lovasoa wrote: post #126

This sounds like a cool project! Does anyone here knows how it compares to univerjs ? I currently use univerjs to power the open source sql spreadsheet component I work on ( https://github.com/sqlpage/sqlpage-spreadsheet/ ). My experience with it has been that it's very powerful, but quite difficult to use due to the boilerplate involved, the lacking documentation, and the fact that it seems to be developed mainly fo…

Woah! I didn't realize luckysheets renamed to univerjs!

I think at the time being you should stick to univerjs as it is a finalized product. Once we reach version 1.0, IronCalc should be easier to deal with and you cold consider using one or the other.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#147

Post by nhatcher »

microflash wrote: post #123

Impressive project. I’ve dealt with Excel a lot so anything new and ope source catches my attention. The docs currently focus on the engine part but I’m more interested in the integrations (for example, with Java, Angular, Vue etc). I’m currently on mobile but I’ll have to take a look at your React example to see if I can write a working Angular or Vue example.

The idea is to have an egine that is clearly separated from the various "skins" like a React, Vue, a TUI or a desktop app. At the moment the React component is a bit difficult to use in isolation. I need to provide a npm package that folks can install

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#148

Post by nhatcher »

openrisk wrote: post #112

Is this similar to pysheets? From a quickscan it seems that its running client-side via rust/wasm but where are the data stored? Interesting to see all those different takes on the spreadsheet metaphor.

The data is stored in your browser's localStorage.

I think the take is a tad different form pysheets. Cool tool though!

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#149

Post by nhatcher »

paradite wrote: post #103

In it's current form, how would I integrate the engine and UI in an existing software with, say Java backend and React front-end? I couldn't find docs on how to use it in languages other than rust. Perhaps via IPC?

At the time of writing, you can use Rust, Javascript and Python bindings.

The React front-end communicates with wasm compiled from Rust.

Java bindings are planed but not in the next ~6 months. A client/serve architecture (like libreoffice does) with IPC or sockets might be a good idea for languages that we don't provide bindings to. also not planned for the next 6 months

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#150

Post by delusional »

anyfactor wrote: post #129

I was an excel enthusiast and studied accounting mainly for Excel. Although I have moved to programming unlike most I still do think Excel is awesome. I sincerely commend the enthusiasm, but working in the industry as the "excel expert", I think most outsider does not understand the "cult" aspect of Excel. Excel works. That is it. Trying to replace excel with anything will be percieved as replacing a calculator with…

> So, in practice what usually happens is that, when people hit UX challenges they go to a consulting firm and commission a backoffice software to address the Excel limitations. Some business may pay for nocode but that is very rare. They go to backoffice software firm and they build a CRUD software that is now not replacing Excel but compliments it.

Heh, where were you 6 month ago when my team was pitching some of our traders on replacing a system they'd built for balancing their strategy. It was built in excel of course, but what surprised me was the resistance to changing it at all. They all hated the thing, it was slow and crashed often, and right in the middle of the difficult part of the work too. Working with it was a terrible experience, even for people used to medium business enterprise crap. Yet they refused to consider any alternative to building some CRUD around it that would extract the worst parts.

The issue we faced was that there was no way we could contribute to this excel monster while still following the risk tolerance of our department. It's not that we're opposed to building something that is probably a bad idea, if it helps build relationships that let us build something better later. It's more that as soon as IT touches it, we get to own every legal aspect of it too. So they ended up with an external consultant that built them what was essentially an external database they could query, which was then supplied with data by some program somewhere.

It ended exactly as you say. They got a back-office firm to develop some one-off hack that alleviated the immediate problem, without replacing excel.

Post reply on HN