[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.

.

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).

[janci]

Hey sheetjs, I have been trying to buy a Pro license from you but only got ghosted :(