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IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

ironcalc.com

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Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#171

Post by skissane »

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…

Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever.

Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc.

Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the past too. I’m not sure if he even knows what Excel is.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#172

Post by HKH2 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #138
HKH2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'that AI style'. What are some examples?

Gerund Adjective Noun (heading) * Gerund Adjective Noun (bold): (colon) text (non-bold). ---- Already the format like this. Then plus points for sounding like an empty phrase that chatgpt likes. Eg from the heading "Addressing Unmet Needs" then bullet "Empowering SaaS Developers:" in bold. It's hard to describe. If you use chatgpt a lot, you develop an intuition that has many components.

I can sort of see what you're saying, but I think a lot of marketing is like that. Chatgpt is just regurgitating it.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#173

Post by respondo2134 »

skissane wrote: post #171
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…

Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever. Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc. Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the…

I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former.

So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#174

Post by respondo2134 »

atoav wrote: post #160
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 E…

I get what you're saying, and agree with lots of it, but most of the time things built in Excel are not for programmers, usually have no maintenance budgeted, and often are built by non-developers.

To extend your analogy too far, Excel is the 4mm allen key you get with all your Ikea furniture. It's good enough to build all the bog-standard, functional but not particularly nice furniture you need, but sure you'd rather have bespoke custom work. Sometimes you don't have or want the tools, or know how to use them and that's OK.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#175

Post by respondo2134 »

antasvara wrote: post #166
wslh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

a killer feature of Sheets is querying web-based databases for adhoc reporting. You can do this lots of ways including Excel, but sheets was early and makes it very easy. I've saved so much development effort (in Excel or elsewhere) just dumping data into a sheet and letting them at it.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#176

Post by manvillej »

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 feel like any solution that replaces excel must solve a larger problem outside the scope of the spreadsheet.

Data intake, preprocessing, solving performance limitations, executing automated decisions.

If it’s just a “better excel” it’s not better enough.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#177

Post by wombatpm »

no_wizard wrote: post #170
atoav wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Diffs in source control would be sweet

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#178

Post by dleeftink »

respondo2134 wrote: post #173
skissane wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever. Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc. Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the…

I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former. So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#179

Post by ochrist »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #168
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 would very much use a product that would work exactly like Google spreadsheets, web and all, but would be self-hosted.

I use NextCloud with Collabora Online (hosted and trimmed down version of LibreOffice). All self-hosted.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#180

Post by mjrpes »

nhatcher wrote: post #134
negoutputeng wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice project ! and attempt to modernize the spreadsheet tech stack. be warned though, that the feature-set of the modern spreadsheet is gigantic, with tentacles in hundreds of nooks and corners. Any attempt to play catch-up is a losing proposition. Hence you could position it so as not to directly compete with excel - in areas that are new or emerging. trivia: js based https://ethercalc.net/ is in turn is derived fro…

I've said this in some other comment. We can't and will never be as feature full as Excel. We want to find different use cases. A super light spreadsheet with MIT license that you can use anyway you want. If I were to go closed source, for instance, I think I loose 90% of my selling points.

One of my dreams if I were to create my own web-based spreadsheet engine would be to make worksheets much more general purpose and not stuck in tab UI like Excel. You would be able to embed them separately in the page so multiple worksheets could be viewed at the same time. Example: you might have multiple small worksheets with financial summaries where the columns are slightly different. You could also do things like include text above/below worksheets, to present the data in a document-like format.
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