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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 a
by 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 agoThere's probably a case to be made for a simplified spreadsheet tool in a Basecamp/Trello mold.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- martin_ky 9y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoShameless 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 agoDoes GoogleSheets actually match Excel's feature list?
- Aloha 9y agoNot even close - I'd guess its about 20% of the features excel has.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThat is what I thought.