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> Coda is a next-generation spreadsheet designed to make Excel a thing of the past There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they

> Coda is a next-generation spreadsheet designed to make Excel a thing of the past There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they focus on different needs: o https://airtable.com https://airtable.com - use tables for data organization (organize anything) o https://fieldbook.com https://fieldbook.com - spreadsheet as a database o https://www.rowshare.com https://www.rowshare.com share data (share rows, not data) o http://conceptoriented.com http://conceptoriented.com - data transformations and data wrangling (I am the author) o Coda - integration with documents It is interesting if one of these approaches will eventually dominate or we will have a zoo of spreadsheet-like applications.

ryanmarsh 9y ago
There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they focus on different needs: I think this is why Excel/Google Sheets still dominate and will continue to. All of these products do one or a few things things that Excel or Google Sheet do, but perhaps they make it little easier for a novice. I think what people don't understand about Excel (and to a lesser extent Google Sheets) is that it's an IDE. A novice can build interesting things, a power user can build incredible things. The only way to make Excel a thing of the past would be to make a blow-away awesome replacement that does everything excel does but better. There's plenty of blue ocean around Excel and I think each of the products you listed could do just fine. I would love all of Excel's power available to me but delivered like Google Sheets. That would definitely kill Excel. So far neither Microsoft nor Google seem really committed to this. Google Sheets is nice but just grabs the low hanging spreadsheet fruit. Office 365 is anemic. If I had the time and funding I'd love to make a true Excel killer that was a faithful recreation of ALL of Excel's capabilities but delivered in a modern way. I'd pay good money for this. I believe many would. Excel may be a dinosaur, but it's still the apex predator.
- rhizome 9y ago
  There's probably a case to be made for a simplified spreadsheet tool in a Basecamp/Trello mold.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    I don't want simple. I want all the complexity and complex features. Everyone has a simple spreadsheet these days.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      Then I have good news for you: you can use an existing spreadsheet app or a relational database!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- martin_ky 9y ago
  I am genuinely curious to learn what do you mean by "delivered in a modern way"? Which parts of Excel are obsolete and could be modernized?
  - mschaef 9y ago
    I can't speak for ryanmarsh, but I have a few thoughts. * Excel really has two major ways of performing computations on data - formulas within the grid and actions upon the grid. Despite the utility of the formula based dataflow model, there are too many operations that have to be performed as one-shot operations via commands (or scripted via VBA). Having formula based approaches for sorting, dividing into bins, etc. would be very useful. * It'd be nice if Excel cells could contain values other than scalars. (Arrays, tuples, lists, maps, matrices, complex numbers, etc.) * VBA can be used to define custom functions, but there's a lot of marshalling overhead going to VBA and the programming model is slightly different. It'd be nice to fix both of those issues. * There's no way to locally bind names within a cell formula, so often subexpressions have to be duplicated. (And I believe they're doubly evaluated too.)
    - zgao 9y ago
      Shameless plug: I'm a founder of Alphasheets, a company seeking to solve problems like these! I couldn't resist replying after seeing these comments. We make a collaborative (Google Sheets style) spreadsheet with Python and R running in the sheet. You can define functions, plot using ggplot, embed numpy dataframes, matrices and all that good stuff. We don't let people use macros, all the code runs in cells because we think macros are too brittle. You can check out the website at http://alphasheets.com http://alphasheets.com . We're seeing that many enterprises (for example, in finance) that have Excel power users are moving to Python because of limitations like these, and are running into adoption issues because people like spreadsheets so much. That's generally where we come in and provide a bridge from the Excel world to Python through a more friendly frontend. We're also seeing that Alphasheets can help a lot with shortening feedback cycles on more sophisticated data analyses- Excel is the most popular self-serve analytics tool out there, but doesn't cover cases where you need Python/R/fresh data.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Does GoogleSheets actually match Excel's feature list?
  - Aloha 9y ago
    Not even close - I'd guess its about 20% of the features excel has.
    - SubiculumCode 9y ago
      That is what I thought.
dunham 9y ago
Also https://zenkit.com/ https://zenkit.com/ (fairly similar to airtable) Years ago there was DabbleDB - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB And Simile Exhibit experimented with a dynamic UI for filtering / faceting tabular data - http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ The witheve.com stuff (and the underlying "differential dataflow") is also interesting as a model for derived data which updates itself. I'm keeping an eye on that project too. As far as your site goes (I just took a brief glance), if you haven't seen it already, you might find some interesting ideas in the sieuferd project: http://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/sieuferd/index.html http://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/sieuferd/index.html
- donarb 9y ago
  Oh, yea. DabbleDB was amazing! Eventually bought by Twitter. Here's a demo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY
Glench 9y ago
To throw my hat in the ring, I'm developing a prototype environment for data transformations I'm calling Flowsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q Although my goal is to use it to understand how we can write software better.
- westoncb 9y ago
  Pretty awesome, bGlench! ;) I wonder if a kind of hybrid programming would be possible which switches between this dataflow-like functionality for parts and more traditional ('large blocks of text'-based) techniques for other parts. I was working on a simple framework a while ago where the highest-level organizational structure was a 'domain' and these domains would connect to one another via 'converters'. I think the dataflow format would work really well for defining and linking up domains, and small functions that do things like filtering would work well within converters—but then maybe within particular domains it's somewhat of a free-for-all again (i.e. you use traditional programming techniques). Just thought I'd share the idea on the off chance that it sparks something for ya—I'm not really doing anything with that project at the moment. I'm also curious why you prefer the tabular format over something graph-based. Is it just that it's more straightforward for people to lay things out/organize?
- MattRix 9y ago
  Some neat ideas here! Also one of the most entertaining demo videos I've seen in a while :P
hyuuu 9y ago
there is a typo in the first sentence of the welcome pop up
- conceptoriented 9y ago
  thanks!
coverband 9y ago
I'm not currently a user but https://www.smartsheet.com/ https://www.smartsheet.com/ had pretty advanced features that I liked. The UI was a bit old-fashioned but the tool is capable.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maximebf 9y ago
There's also Kantree (https://kantree.io https://kantree.io) in a similar space than Airtable and Zenkit. (I'm a cofounder)
ksec 9y ago
Thx!. First time I heard of rowshare and it is exactly what i am looking for. I wish excel or every excel like apps has this .

ryanmarsh 9y ago

There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they focus on different needs: I think this is why Excel/Google Sheets still dominate and will continue to. All of these products do one or a few things things that Excel or Google Sheet do, but perhaps they make it little easier for a novice. I think what people don't understand about Excel (and to a lesser extent Google Sheets) is that it's an IDE. A novice can build interesting things, a power user can build incredible things. The only way to make Excel a thing of the past would be to make a blow-away awesome replacement that does everything excel does but better. There's plenty of blue ocean around Excel and I think each of the products you listed could do just fine. I would love all of Excel's power available to me but delivered like Google Sheets. That would definitely kill Excel. So far neither Microsoft nor Google seem really committed to this. Google Sheets is nice but just grabs the low hanging spreadsheet fruit. Office 365 is anemic. If I had the time and funding I'd love to make a true Excel killer that was a faithful recreation of ALL of Excel's capabilities but delivered in a modern way. I'd pay good money for this. I believe many would. Excel may be a dinosaur, but it's still the apex predator.

rhizome 9y ago
There's probably a case to be made for a simplified spreadsheet tool in a Basecamp/Trello mold.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  I don't want simple. I want all the complexity and complex features. Everyone has a simple spreadsheet these days.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Then I have good news for you: you can use an existing spreadsheet app or a relational database!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
martin_ky 9y ago
I am genuinely curious to learn what do you mean by "delivered in a modern way"? Which parts of Excel are obsolete and could be modernized?
- mschaef 9y ago
  I can't speak for ryanmarsh, but I have a few thoughts. * Excel really has two major ways of performing computations on data - formulas within the grid and actions upon the grid. Despite the utility of the formula based dataflow model, there are too many operations that have to be performed as one-shot operations via commands (or scripted via VBA). Having formula based approaches for sorting, dividing into bins, etc. would be very useful. * It'd be nice if Excel cells could contain values other than scalars. (Arrays, tuples, lists, maps, matrices, complex numbers, etc.) * VBA can be used to define custom functions, but there's a lot of marshalling overhead going to VBA and the programming model is slightly different. It'd be nice to fix both of those issues. * There's no way to locally bind names within a cell formula, so often subexpressions have to be duplicated. (And I believe they're doubly evaluated too.)
  - zgao 9y ago
    Shameless plug: I'm a founder of Alphasheets, a company seeking to solve problems like these! I couldn't resist replying after seeing these comments. We make a collaborative (Google Sheets style) spreadsheet with Python and R running in the sheet. You can define functions, plot using ggplot, embed numpy dataframes, matrices and all that good stuff. We don't let people use macros, all the code runs in cells because we think macros are too brittle. You can check out the website at http://alphasheets.com http://alphasheets.com . We're seeing that many enterprises (for example, in finance) that have Excel power users are moving to Python because of limitations like these, and are running into adoption issues because people like spreadsheets so much. That's generally where we come in and provide a bridge from the Excel world to Python through a more friendly frontend. We're also seeing that Alphasheets can help a lot with shortening feedback cycles on more sophisticated data analyses- Excel is the most popular self-serve analytics tool out there, but doesn't cover cases where you need Python/R/fresh data.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Does GoogleSheets actually match Excel's feature list?
- Aloha 9y ago
  Not even close - I'd guess its about 20% of the features excel has.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    That is what I thought.

dunham 9y ago

Also https://zenkit.com/ https://zenkit.com/ (fairly similar to airtable) Years ago there was DabbleDB - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB And Simile Exhibit experimented with a dynamic UI for filtering / faceting tabular data - http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ The witheve.com stuff (and the underlying "differential dataflow") is also interesting as a model for derived data which updates itself. I'm keeping an eye on that project too. As far as your site goes (I just took a brief glance), if you haven't seen it already, you might find some interesting ideas in the sieuferd project: http://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/sieuferd/index.html http://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/sieuferd/index.html

donarb 9y ago
Oh, yea. DabbleDB was amazing! Eventually bought by Twitter. Here's a demo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY

Glench 9y ago

To throw my hat in the ring, I'm developing a prototype environment for data transformations I'm calling Flowsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q Although my goal is to use it to understand how we can write software better.

westoncb 9y ago
Pretty awesome, bGlench! ;) I wonder if a kind of hybrid programming would be possible which switches between this dataflow-like functionality for parts and more traditional ('large blocks of text'-based) techniques for other parts. I was working on a simple framework a while ago where the highest-level organizational structure was a 'domain' and these domains would connect to one another via 'converters'. I think the dataflow format would work really well for defining and linking up domains, and small functions that do things like filtering would work well within converters—but then maybe within particular domains it's somewhat of a free-for-all again (i.e. you use traditional programming techniques). Just thought I'd share the idea on the off chance that it sparks something for ya—I'm not really doing anything with that project at the moment. I'm also curious why you prefer the tabular format over something graph-based. Is it just that it's more straightforward for people to lay things out/organize?
MattRix 9y ago
Some neat ideas here! Also one of the most entertaining demo videos I've seen in a while :P

hyuuu 9y ago

there is a typo in the first sentence of the welcome pop up

conceptoriented 9y ago
thanks!

coverband 9y ago

I'm not currently a user but https://www.smartsheet.com/ https://www.smartsheet.com/ had pretty advanced features that I liked. The UI was a bit old-fashioned but the tool is capable.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

maximebf 9y ago

There's also Kantree (https://kantree.io https://kantree.io) in a similar space than Airtable and Zenkit. (I'm a cofounder)

ksec 9y ago

Thx!. First time I heard of rowshare and it is exactly what i am looking for. I wish excel or every excel like apps has this .