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IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

ironcalc.com

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Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#211

Post by zitterbewegung »

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…

You are totally correct but, pragmatically excel can be used as a prototyping system for nearly every business and if you need to have higher complexity you port it into a Python script. This is not unheard of and I think it's a common pattern. When you have your business analysts already getting something that works its much better than having a set of meetings trying to discuss what the needs are from the business.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#212

Post by atoav »

respondo2134 wrote: post #174
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…

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 rathe…

Which is precisely my opinion as well. My post was a caveat, nothing against Excel at all.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#213

Post by alsetmusic »

jeffreyq wrote: post #189
mritchie712 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

cool and slick website. reminds me of linear.app but when i attempt to scroll all the way down it lags. i'm on macbook air with chrome browser

I was viewing in Safari on an M1 Max MBP with no lag. Read this and switched to Chrome and confirmed lag when scrolling. Also lagged returning upward.

It was the only page open in Chrome, freshly launched specifically for this test. Safari has a bajillion open windows and tabs. Something about how Chrome handles the page is definitely odd.

Just for fun, I also tested in Firefox, which was already open with fifteen windows, most of which have a handful of tabs. No lag there.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#214

Post by alsetmusic »

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've only watched an Excel expert work their magic in person once and it was straight up sorcery. I'm glad not to need to learn it, but it was eye-opening seeing her rapidly make changes (with me not understanding what she was doing, sorta how non-experts likely perceive what we do when we help them with their personal devices) and come out with exactly what she wanted. Must have taken her about a minute and there were changes every several seconds until she was done.

Black magic in the hands of an experienced user.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#215

Post by mikeyouse »

dleeftink wrote: post #178
respondo2134 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly in jest but the use case where Sheets falls over for me is copying formulas to the right…

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#217

Post by Aeolun »

nhatcher wrote: post #159
Aeolun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I suppose at least you get to check off a lot of boxes when another formula passes all test cases :)

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#218

Post by Nathanba »

mmooss wrote: post #195
Nathanba wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Words have a fairly precise dictionary meaning and it's important not to constantly wage a word war where you want to win political and social arguments through word redefinitions. It's information pollution, you redefine words like "love", "equality", "freedom", "democracy" until they mean something completely different and suddenly you have a divided population that can't even talk to each other anymore because all this confusion that you just had over the word "democracy" is only possible because you are misusing the word.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#219

Post by atoav »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #211
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…

You are totally correct but, pragmatically excel can be used as a prototyping system for nearly every business and if you need to have higher complexity you port it into a Python script. This is not unheard of and I think it's a common pattern. When you have your business analysts already getting something that works its much better than having a set of meetings trying to discuss what the needs are from the business.

Yeah but that is what I meant with the right tools. Anybody would agree that drafting your application on a big whiteboard or a piece of paper might be totally acceptable.

But running your entire org on a single whiteboard or a piece of paper only works up to a certain size and comes with downsides as the org grows. Same thing goes for one big excel file where people have to take turns with editing.

Re: IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

#220

Post by nhatcher »

paradite wrote: post #163
nhatcher wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The server:

* Serves the files * Stores if you click share * Converts to xlsx if you download * Imports model

The engine is fully compiled to wasm and run in the browser.

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