The World Cup of Microsoft Excel

• SheetJS js-xlsx

  61 34,507 2.4 JavaScript

  📗 SheetJS Spreadsheet Data Toolkit -- New home https://git.sheetjs.com/SheetJS/sheetjs

  

The hardest unsolved problem is document compatibility. It's not enough to have a cool tool -- you need to be able to interchange data with existing users of Excel and other workflows. This was an important piece during Excel's journey to overtake Lotus 1-2-3.

We (https://sheetjs.com/) have been looking into document compatibility for 10 years (celebrating our 10 year birthday this week!), and our eponymous open source project https://github.com/sheetjs/sheetjs is used by companies large and small. It's not a particularly glamorous subject and doesn't tend to electrify people in the same way as build tools or frameworks.

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There are ways to improve upon the space, but the problem is that the world has changed. Excel was designed to be the "center of the universe", a creative substrate that bypassed org security policies and enabled extremely flexible line of business tools. Excel was designed to be used by one user at a time, with fundamental inconsistencies blocked at the UI level (for example, try entering a bad custom number format). This made sense 20 years ago, but it doesn't make as much sense now.

The current crop of SaaS companies effectively monetize access to the data. They aren't incentivized to make it easy to export metadata back to Excel -- they want to keep you using the software. This runs at odds with the data portability and freedom that is needed for a successful replacement.

Whatever will replace Excel won't be a facsimile of the current tooling (what Google and Apple are trying to do), nor will it be a siloed experience (what the myriad of SaaS apps are trying to do).

• nexo

  2 6 10.0 Haskell

  A strongly-typed spreadsheet focussing on ease of use and maintainability

There’s Inflex [0], which has a very interesting (and I think better) approach to spreadsheets. I’ve also been working independently on a similar idea [1], though it’s early days yet and I’m still busy figuring out the how to build it in a principled way. The Inflex website also has a really nice bibliography [2] with a fairly complete catalogue of what else has been done in this space.

[0] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex/

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/nexo

[2] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex-bibliography/

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

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