Calc and Dbeaver with DuckDb for me. If it compiles with Mingw, why not.
IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
191–200 of 238 posts
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#192I 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…
> > Any sufficiently complicated startup or young company contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of 10% of Excel.
Let's give Philip Greenspun due credit for this phrase. I'm going to guess there's at least one generation who isn't familiar with it.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#193Any plans to add C bindings? Most other languages have a decent FFI story, and being usable from C will make it more universally usable.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lik…
This is how Apple's Numbers.app works.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy doesn't have anything to do with "equality in rights, freedom, and opportunity"? That is the point of and foundation of democracy - no democracy without them. It's incredible that people are so anxious to destroy freedom and humanitarianism (why?) that they adopt an obviously false history. Those have long been believed to be the foundations of democracy; you might have heard this one, which founded one dem…
All of those are just additional things ones wishes democracies to have but are not inherent in the word definition. I can certainly see that some people wish to have the definition of "democracy" expanded to mean many additional things but that really isn't the point of having that very precise word.
What basis do you have to say that? Otherwise, these claims are just bytes with no force behind them. You can see the overwhelming evidence and consensus otherwise, stretching over centuries!
Even more, why do you want it to be true? Why do people want to eliminate their own and others human rights, an incredibly positive basis for society and for your freedom and prosperity, which has resulted in what are by far the most successful societies and people, by many measures, in human history? You're giving away all that for what? To look clever and 'with it'? Smarter than democracy? Very clever.
You should be fighting for it, like your predecessors did. Otherwise, you'll lose it. There are people actively and successfully taking it away, while you are engaging in this philosphical exercise.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#196Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Much of Excels dominance is due to its legacy pervasiveness in certain industries/ roles (notably finance or financial related but there’s strong bureaucratic use of it as well asan ad-hoc tracking tool for instance) and the fact that two generations of people grew up using it. I’ve noticed over the years that younger generations are far more used to using Google Sheets since schools and universities have strong adop…
What do you mean by “run business logic rules over the calculations”? Genuine question.
Don’t most people embed business logic into their spreadsheet formulas?
Or is there something else you’re referring to?
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#198I 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…
My first career was at a fintech company that sold auditing data. All of our clients were accountants, auditors, lawyers, etc.
Every single person worked in Excel. It didn't matter how old our website was, how crappy our code was - all that matter was that we generated a CSV.
I used Excel often - I think many people underestimate how powerful Excel is and how much of finance / auditing relies upon it.
My co-workers used to joke that the world runs on Excel. That some of the most important economic documents are probably some .xlsx file named "economy-v3" that people send back and forth over email.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#199I 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 have had my fair share backlash when trying to introduce replacement and complimentary tools. To replace excel, you not only need to advocate for it's usefulness and you need to be also be liable to the complaints from excel users. If anything goes wrong no how minor with the new tool, you are the one who introduced all these mess.
That is a universal issue of IT management: Any change implemented in IT systems (or anything else) will get that kind of resistance - bigger changes cause more resistance. If you change their primary tool, which they use all day and on which their jobs depend, expect a lot of resistance. The solutions:
1) Get management buy-in. They set the ceiling for acceptance - very few underlings will have more interest or make more effort than their management; if the manager dislikes it, doesn't use it, is disinterested, etc., then most others will do the same. Also, management is your support - when someone objects, they are not just objecting to you, they are objecting to their manager.
2) Get user buy-in. This is perfectly reasonable, if you think about it: Their tools, they use the tool all day, their jobs, probably they should have the biggest say. It means obtaining and utilizing their input from the start on what the tool should and should not do, etc. It may not be what you planned or expect; it may shatter your dreams; that's good - your fantasy was not aligned with reality. They provide the user end (e.g., 'don't change the keyboard UI that is in all our muscle memory and in all our documentation, and automated in macros'; 'of course you are migrating our macros, on which we depend, right?!'), you provide the technical end (e.g., 'we need a database with a spreadsheet UI and not a file-based spreadsheet').
3) Use all your development skills: test, mvp, deploy, iterate, etc.
4) Use some social intelligence: Deliver to the most interested, capable users first. Others will see them being uber-productive and want one too. Provide everyone with incredible, highly responsive support. Etc.
Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
#200I 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 a long time Google sheets user I recently was involved in a project for one of these Excel heavy enterprises. I proposed the CRUD solution to complement their use case but the solution was not received well. They couldn't allocate computer resources to host the solution within their infra easily. So they pushed back and asked us to develop some Excel add-on, PowerBI based dashboard or some kind of Microsoft no cod…
This mirrors my experience. I am the accounting manager responsible for updating these dashboards at my saas employer. Troubleshooting powerbi errors during month-end close is the most stress-inducing thing. And whenever management wants a dashboard edit, we have to somehow know that the spreadsheets being fed the powerbi cloud data will also change. Maybe an extra row inserted into the pivot table of ARR by product. Now any formulas directly referencing the cells rather than using XLOOKUP are pointing to the wrong product category. I was chewed out hard for that one a few days ago even though IT made that change, since it updated our report after review. TLDR: Powerbi suck, use a data warehouse and SQL for data transformations.