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IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

ironcalc.com

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Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#151

Post by wslh »

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…

As an expert in Excel, don’t you think Google Sheets has chipped away at Excel's dominance in a very smart way? I’m not saying that Google Sheets is a complete competitor to Excel, but it has been highly user-oriented. And, if we add Apple Numbers to this discussion, I feel it’s still at a kindergarten level by comparison.

I think this is where IronCalc like software could thrive: finding a non-complete competition to Excel, and Google Sheets that does the other part of the work better.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#152

Post by nhatcher »

Nathanba wrote: post #79
franga2000 wrote: post #24

It's a cool project, but wow is the top of the page just absolute buzzword salad! > The democratization of spreadsheets > Empowering Everyone with Advanced, Open-Source Spreadsheet Solutions It's a really fast spreadsheet engine that runs entirely in the browser and is fully open source. That's all the sales pitch I'd need, but I'm a developer... So, serious question: who is this kind of marketing targeting?

I think using the word "democratization" is the main issue, how does that even make sense in software? Who is doing the voting? You just "vote" by forking...? I don't get it, you also "vote" by using Microsoft Excel.

You are right. I created a ticket to remedy this:

https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc.github.io/issues/14

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#153

Post by nhatcher »

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…

I think I understand the cult part of Excel. And to be honest, Excel is a fantastic tool. I don't think IronCalc can ever replace Excel (a boy can dream though!). But many companies need a spreadsheet of sorts they can embed in their product. Allow me a bit of humour:

> Any sufficiently complicated startup or young company contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of 10% of Excel.

Maybe we can use IronCalc for those cases?

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#154

Post by nhatcher »

bsenftner wrote: post #140
nhatcher wrote: post #5

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

How does your project compare to: https://bossanova.uk/jspreadsheet/v4/ which is the open source version of https://jspreadsheets.com/ Serious question. I base a lot of work off the open source jspreadsheet. Curious about yours.

At the moment they are a full production ready product, we only have an MVP.

If and when we reach version 1.0 we might be comparable. And you might want to use one or the other. It its difficult to say who the two product will compare in a year from now but probably IronCalc will be lighter, easier to integrate, faster in computations but not so feature full.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#155

Post by thezipcreator »

usr1106 wrote: post #141
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…

FOSS is more anarchistic than democratic, I think. Sure, there exist democratic organizations like the Debian Organization, but if you don't agree with their decisions not much binds you to them (that's how projects like Devuan can exist). The same applies to projects with BDFLs as well (altho I do disagree with that form of governance for a project).

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#156

Post by nhatcher »

yowlingcat wrote: post #70
nhatcher wrote: post #5

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

Very cool library. I like the goal of Excel support (it truly is an incredible platform). A couple of questions: 1) Any plans for programmatic manipulation of pivot tables? Looking across the Python ecosystem, outside of xlwings (which essentially requires FFI manipulation of a running instance of Excel), nothing else makes it possible. It does look like some .NET Excel libraries support it. 2) Will there be ability…

> 1) Any plans for programmatic manipulation of pivot tables?

As soon as we possibly can

2) Will there be ability to use the engine as library? Would love to use something like this through Python bindings.

That is in place already! It is an MVP, so I haven't published all packages for all architectures but you can compile it from source:

https://github.com/ironcalc/IronCalc/tree/main/bindings/pyth...

https://pypi.org/project/ironcalc/

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#157

Post by nhatcher »

phonon wrote: post #111

Have you looked at these other somewhat similar Rust projects? https://github.com/logisky/LogiSheets https://github.com/natefduncan/excel-emulator https://github.com/jiradaherbst/XLFormula-Engine https://github.com/omid/formula https://crates.io/crates/df-web/0.1.28

I _think_ I saw the XLFormula-Engine. At least the name rings a bell.

I guess I have some reading to do!

What is the last one?

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#158

Post by nhatcher »

eointierney wrote: post #76

Congratulations, this is awesome. One of those "why hasn't someone done this already?" projects. I can see this becoming transformative and superseding Excel, which is a bold claim to make. But this is compliant (with Excel), performant, extensible, free, and in-browser. This could easily become almost an emacs-level editor. Think of the interfaces that could be built to this in this? I'll be sharing this with every…

Woah, thanks for the kind words!

This is out of date, and not a priority ATM, but we will have a TUI for it:

https://github.com/ironcalc/TironCalc

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#159

Post by nhatcher »

Aeolun wrote: post #82
eointierney wrote: post #76

Congratulations, this is awesome. One of those "why hasn't someone done this already?" projects. I can see this becoming transformative and superseding Excel, which is a bold claim to make. But this is compliant (with Excel), performant, extensible, free, and in-browser. This could easily become almost an emacs-level editor. Think of the interfaces that could be built to this in this? I'll be sharing this with every…

> One of those "why hasn't someone done this already?" projects. I think this one is fairly clear. It’s because it’s a massive amount of work with a not necessarily large payoff for yourself? I think some of these basically get made when someone gets too annoyed something similar doesn’t exist.

It is a massive amount of work. Another thing I might add, not the most appealing thing to work on.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#160

Post by atoav »

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…

Excel is powerful, but it is also important to consider its limitations.

Things will get real when your orgs problems/needs grow from something that was totally cool to do with spreadsheets to something requiring higher complexity, performance, resilience, testability, coordination, ... — and the point at which you cross over into the latter is not always clearly marked.

It would for example not be advisable to use Excel sheets as a replacement for a distributed database of central importance, unless your org is a lemonade stand with 3 employees.

I would also prefer maintaining a python script with written tests over maintaining an Excel file containing complex business logic, but maybe that is just personal perference.

Don't get me wrong here, Excel is amazing and we should all use it where it shines. But as with all tools we need to be aware of the fact that they heavily color the way we look at problems, as expressed by Maslows famous aphorism: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

Good engineers should not be blinded by their tools, but accutly aware of their limitations and know which to use when. Just like with hand tools you could probably also just hammer a nail in using a shovel or "drill" a hole using a screwdriver and Excel is very versatile in those regards: it can get you very far without being the best solution, a bit like a swiss pocket knife.

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