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 some alien substance that does math. Excel is like Pencil and Pen. You can not replace it.
Excel is not software it is a tool.
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.
So, in practice what usually happens is that, when people hit UX challenges they go to a consulting firm and commission a backoffice software to address the Excel limitations. Some business may pay for nocode but that is very rare. They go to backoffice software firm and they build a CRUD software that is now not replacing Excel but compliments it.
- I think you should report the rev somewhere. I can’t tell what the “current rev” is in GitHub or in the running demo.
- The roadmap says what’s coming in 0.5 (October 2024), but it’s not clear whether 0.5 is “done” or if that’s what’s running on the demo site today.
IronCalc would be awesome as an “embedded viewer” for data. I’m currently implementing an internal web app where I’d love to provide “monitoring” by just dumping a whole lot of transactional data from the db into a “live” IronCalc spreadsheet as a “view” tool that you could also do some data exploration in.
The 0.5 roadmap says “API to set and read values from cells” but it’s not clear to me whether it would be possible or not to embed it today and inject data at “start” time from JS. The scope of the current docs is “using it as a spreadsheet” but they don’t cover “how to embed it / integrate it”.
Love love LOVE! Would embed it TODAY as a data viewer could. :) Nice work! I am watching with bated breath!
It’s a great ambition to replace Excel and many went down this path before. Congratulations to even attempting to achieve it and going this far to do it.
Excel compatibility, when fully realized, will remove the major obstacle to adoption. Given the current stronghold Excel has on the market.
Once that is achieved do you plan to offer a transition to more modern forms of calculations as vectors and arrays formula panels together with frozen sheets of raw data and output? Thus separating logic and model.
Also when your solution adoption will have grown much larger you should learn from the experiences Bavaria and CERN went through. Microsoft stronghold more often than not has nothing to do with technical prowess.
cool project, but I don't particularly like "The democratization of spreadsheets" as a catchphrase. Like, what does that even mean? If by "democratization" you mean like, more able to be used, well anyone can go download LibreOffice or for the web use CryptPad's Spreadsheets, and if you mean that it's more open, well both of those are open source. Is this project specifically run democratically or something? It just seems like a really bad use of meaningless marketing terminology.
A spreadsheet engine. It's a React app with a Rust backend, but it impressed me how snappy it was[0]. Of course, it's not nearly as feature rich as Google Sheets, not to mention Excel.
Awesome project! Looking forward to following this.
I've been looking out for projects like this over the years and I'm glad to see that this one takes Excel compatibility seriously! Also love the choice of Rust and WASM!
For me Dynamic Array support is a blocker and I can't play with it until you've got that. Very glad to see that's your top priority though[1]! That and everything in the Logical, Lookup and Reference, and Information sections (in that order). That covers probably over 95% of my work and I spend most of my time in Excel.
This sounds like a cool project! Does anyone here knows how it compares to univerjs ?
I currently use univerjs to power the open source sql spreadsheet component I work on (https://github.com/sqlpage/sqlpage-spreadsheet/). My experience with it has been that it's very powerful, but quite difficult to use due to the boilerplate involved, the lacking documentation, and the fact that it seems to be developed mainly for the Chinese market.
Can't tell by the docs (but I've not dug in much yet) but... @nhatcher... here's a use case question.
Admins use the ironcalc UI to create their formulas. Is there a way to get those formulas to a backend and run the calcs on the server itself (separate from the user's browser) to get results based on input from other sources?
The UI half looks great so far. I have a colleague I was going to recommend this to, but they more need the 'run the formulas on the server' part more than anything else. They've got some custom Rust stuff running already, but having admins come up with their advanced formulas, then translating that to server code - that takes the time. It seems they may be able to use this to have this handle both ends of the workload, without the translation layer.
Congratulations, this is awesome. One of those "why hasn't someone done this already?" projects.
I can see this becoming transformative and superseding Excel, which is a bold claim to make. But this is compliant (with Excel), performant, extensible, free, and in-browser. This could easily become almost an emacs-level editor.
Think of the interfaces that could be built to this in this?
When I worked at the Excel team our motto was Excel is the second best tool for everything.
I'm excited to see more players in this space though, all the standards are open and there are decent libraries with decent licenses that exist. A lightweight LibreOffice alternative would be neat and something truly open source and embeddable (MIT) is great.
Had a comment here about larger values/arbitrary precision (e.g. 74829901923401860/14408150751351922) and realised that it isn't choking on the number but it seems to error if I paste in values? In Firefox:
I was recently looking for a Linux alternative to LibreOffice Calc and couldn't find something that meets my needs (mostly CSV import/export, filtering and pivot tables). It's great to see this new contender showing up and even if it lacks major features what's there so far looks very good. This is promising! Congrats for the good work and best wishes for what's to come.
I am quite excited about the new era of WASM webapps - those are cross-platform & fast. Unlike traditional desktop programs those are sand-boxed & unlike mobile apps the distribution channels are open ("side-loading" by default).
Nice work. Clicked around in it, some default features I'm used to are missing, like clicking on a row or column header to select the whole thing, or double click the resizer between two columns to autosize the column to content length.
It's a cool project, but wow is the top of the page just absolute buzzword salad!
> The democratization of spreadsheets
> Empowering Everyone with Advanced, Open-Source Spreadsheet Solutions
It's a really fast spreadsheet engine that runs entirely in the browser and is fully open source. That's all the sales pitch I'd need, but I'm a developer...
So, serious question: who is this kind of marketing targeting?
IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
(ironcalc.com)720 points by kaathewise 9 November 2024 | 226 comments
Comments
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 some alien substance that does math. Excel is like Pencil and Pen. You can not replace it.
Excel is not software it is a tool.
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.
So, in practice what usually happens is that, when people hit UX challenges they go to a consulting firm and commission a backoffice software to address the Excel limitations. Some business may pay for nocode but that is very rare. They go to backoffice software firm and they build a CRUD software that is now not replacing Excel but compliments it.
- I think you should add a CHANGELOG.md, so people can see progress/features evolve (https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/)
- I think you should report the rev somewhere. I can’t tell what the “current rev” is in GitHub or in the running demo.
- The roadmap says what’s coming in 0.5 (October 2024), but it’s not clear whether 0.5 is “done” or if that’s what’s running on the demo site today.
IronCalc would be awesome as an “embedded viewer” for data. I’m currently implementing an internal web app where I’d love to provide “monitoring” by just dumping a whole lot of transactional data from the db into a “live” IronCalc spreadsheet as a “view” tool that you could also do some data exploration in.
The 0.5 roadmap says “API to set and read values from cells” but it’s not clear to me whether it would be possible or not to embed it today and inject data at “start” time from JS. The scope of the current docs is “using it as a spreadsheet” but they don’t cover “how to embed it / integrate it”.
Love love LOVE! Would embed it TODAY as a data viewer could. :) Nice work! I am watching with bated breath!
Excel compatibility, when fully realized, will remove the major obstacle to adoption. Given the current stronghold Excel has on the market.
Once that is achieved do you plan to offer a transition to more modern forms of calculations as vectors and arrays formula panels together with frozen sheets of raw data and output? Thus separating logic and model.
Also when your solution adoption will have grown much larger you should learn from the experiences Bavaria and CERN went through. Microsoft stronghold more often than not has nothing to do with technical prowess.
[0]: https://app.ironcalc.com/
I've been looking out for projects like this over the years and I'm glad to see that this one takes Excel compatibility seriously! Also love the choice of Rust and WASM!
For me Dynamic Array support is a blocker and I can't play with it until you've got that. Very glad to see that's your top priority though[1]! That and everything in the Logical, Lookup and Reference, and Information sections (in that order). That covers probably over 95% of my work and I spend most of my time in Excel.
1: https://docs.ironcalc.com/
https://github.com/logisky/LogiSheets
https://github.com/natefduncan/excel-emulator
https://github.com/jiradaherbst/XLFormula-Engine
https://github.com/omid/formula
https://crates.io/crates/df-web/0.1.28
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/excel/concepts/...
I currently use univerjs to power the open source sql spreadsheet component I work on (https://github.com/sqlpage/sqlpage-spreadsheet/). My experience with it has been that it's very powerful, but quite difficult to use due to the boilerplate involved, the lacking documentation, and the fact that it seems to be developed mainly for the Chinese market.
Admins use the ironcalc UI to create their formulas. Is there a way to get those formulas to a backend and run the calcs on the server itself (separate from the user's browser) to get results based on input from other sources?
The UI half looks great so far. I have a colleague I was going to recommend this to, but they more need the 'run the formulas on the server' part more than anything else. They've got some custom Rust stuff running already, but having admins come up with their advanced formulas, then translating that to server code - that takes the time. It seems they may be able to use this to have this handle both ends of the workload, without the translation layer.
Is that something supported, or even feasible?
Thanks!
I can see this becoming transformative and superseding Excel, which is a bold claim to make. But this is compliant (with Excel), performant, extensible, free, and in-browser. This could easily become almost an emacs-level editor.
Think of the interfaces that could be built to this in this?
I'll be sharing this with every student I know.
And the name is a winner.
I'm excited to see more players in this space though, all the standards are open and there are decent libraries with decent licenses that exist. A lightweight LibreOffice alternative would be neat and something truly open source and embeddable (MIT) is great.
Uncaught RuntimeError: unreachable executed pasteCsvText assets/index-BxqQcmeI.js:40
Interesting to see all those different takes on the spreadsheet metaphor.
The docs currently focus on the engine part but I’m more interested in the integrations (for example, with Java, Angular, Vue etc).
I’m currently on mobile but I’ll have to take a look at your React example to see if I can write a working Angular or Vue example.
I couldn't find docs on how to use it in languages other than rust. Perhaps via IPC?
Consider making formula engine standalone as it might be used in other contexts, like Markdown or html tables.
> The democratization of spreadsheets > Empowering Everyone with Advanced, Open-Source Spreadsheet Solutions
It's a really fast spreadsheet engine that runs entirely in the browser and is fully open source. That's all the sales pitch I'd need, but I'm a developer...
So, serious question: who is this kind of marketing targeting?