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by wuming2 592 days ago
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.
2 comments
evanjrowley 592 days ago
>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.

Can you elaborate on those experiences?

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wuming2 592 days ago
The government of Bavaria, one of the wealthiest countries of the German federation and thus of the world, tried to replace Microsoft with Linux and generally FOSS solutions. Twice.

CERN tried to replace Office with NextCloud. It is now struggling to cope with a policy reversal under Microsoft fanboys.

Both cases were also discussed here.

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nhatcher 592 days ago
Yeah, that is not our battle. At least not right now. Excel, and Google sheets, are and will be far more advanced than IronCalc. What we can do is to cater different needs. The focus is on lightweight and open source. Given the billions of spreadsheets out there I wouldn't be surprised if for a small percentage of them IronCalc is a better option.

The reason for Excel compatibility is twofold:

* You can use your workbooks as the are * You don't need to learn a new tool

> 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?

So far, nothing beyond Excel's compatibility

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