| We've thought a lot about this one. It's a good idea for usability - agree with you there - but there are some development complexities that make it hard for other reasons. We spent a considerable amount of time two years ago developing Excel extensions for our spreadsheet-version-control product. It was... not ideal from a development perspective. The benefits of being in Excel (it has all the features!) is also the cost of being in Excel (you have to support all the features!). This means v1 of the extension you describe with either have to be non-functional on most of these power tools you mention, or we'd need to spent years building in stealth mode before launching something fully working (and I'm not even sure we ever could get there... Excel is... literally so big). Also, the actual extension points for Excel are not as fully-featured as you might think! In practice, we'd likely have to gate much of Excel's functionality to get an extension that actually works -- there are some hard limits to what you can extend, further making it really hard to actually support these power tools in practice. Also, for the sake of our users, we love being in a Python development environment! In practice, many of our users move really fluidly back and forth between writing Python and editing a Mito spreadsheet. Effectively - bring a spreadsheet in for what it's good at, when you want it. We'll keep considering this one, though -- I have a _feeling_ Microsoft might make some Python moves in Excel the next few years... :) |
So here’s the thing. You develop once, people use many.
So the point of dev is to do the not ideal things so the many users don’t have to. Suck it up so users have it easy. Software that doesn’t make users change, that doesn’t get in the way of a career of learning to bend Excel to their will, they’ll throw money at you for that.