I was recently looking for a Linux alternative to LibreOffice Calc and couldn't find something that meets my needs (mostly CSV import/export, filtering and pivot tables). It's great to see this new contender showing up and even if it lacks major features what's there so far looks very good. This is promising! Congrats for the good work and best wishes for what's to come.
IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
161–170 of 238 posts
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#162Great, very needed.
Consider making formula engine standalone as it might be used in other contexts, like Markdown or html tables.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#163In 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
> The React front-end communicates with wasm compiled from Rust.
Just to clarify, this means that the entire engine is compiled into wasm and runs inside the browser? There is no server component?
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#164I am quite excited about the new era of WASM webapps - those are cross-platform & fast. Unlike traditional desktop programs those are sand-boxed & unlike mobile apps the distribution channels are open ("side-loading" by default).
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#165I 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 o…
I think this highlights the main issue with replacing Excel, which is that most people have an undocumented, informal workflow with their tools in Excel that would be difficult to replicate fully in other software.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
As someone that has had other software tools replaced with alternatives (think Slack replaced with Teams), the new solution almost always speeds up and fixes a lot of problems. It also invariably screws up at least one thing that I need the tool to do as a part of my job.
I love my IT colleagues, but (and I mean no offense to them or other IT folks) they don't understand that the way we use our internal tools is super flexible and doesn't adhere to an end to end process. It's how we ended up with an entire software platform that takes more manual steps, breaks in a way that we can't fix, and still requires the use of Excel to get the output into the formats that our stakeholders need. It also can't adapt quickly when we need to change things in our process.
It is a technically impressive tool that does the things they designed it to do super well. But we're like a month away from needing an Excel tool (or another piece of software) that can reliably do all the things we didn't realize relied on the "hot spacebar" from the XKCD.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#166I 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 t…
What Google Sheets did that was super innovative IMO was make a spreadsheet that integrates with the entire Google ecosystem.
I am partially joking (they put it on the cloud in a way that's super useful and made collaboration remotely easier, along with other scripting inprovements), but I think it highlights that the main "benefit" to Sheets is that it's a fully featured product created by a mega-corporation that complements other tools they have to offer.
Put another way: how many companies use Microsoft for everything except Excel? How does that compare to companies that use Google Drive for everything except for spreadsheets?
A tool like this one has the upward battle of needing to be so useful, it is worth employing alongside your currently existing office software. It feels like spreadsheet software is a particularly hard arena to compete in, given the quality of the major ones you mentioned.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#167I 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. Mayb…
as a saas founder, I can confirm you are 100% correct about this and we'll be looking at IronCalc for https://www.definite.app/
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#168I 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 would very much use a product that would work exactly like Google spreadsheets, web and all, but would be self-hosted.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#169I 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 would very much use a product that would work exactly like Google spreadsheets, web and all, but would be self-hosted.
Have you tried collabora office and/or onlyoffice ? These could match your need.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#170I 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 E…
What would be nice though is if you could export logic from excel to examine it and port it.
One can dream