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by negoutputeng 591 days ago
nice project ! and attempt to modernize the spreadsheet tech stack. be warned though, that the feature-set of the modern spreadsheet is gigantic, with tentacles in hundreds of nooks and corners. Any attempt to play catch-up is a losing proposition. Hence you could position it so as not to directly compete with excel - in areas that are new or emerging.

trivia: js based https://ethercalc.net/ is in turn is derived from https://github.com/DanBricklin/socialcalc written by the spreadsheet inventor dan bricklin

2 comments

Fun fact: Audrey Tang, creator of Ethercalc, went on to become Minister for Digital Affairs for the Taiwanese government.
I've said this in some other comment. We can't and will never be as feature full as Excel. We want to find different use cases. A super light spreadsheet with MIT license that you can use anyway you want.

If I were to go closed source, for instance, I think I loose 90% of my selling points.

One of my dreams if I were to create my own web-based spreadsheet engine would be to make worksheets much more general purpose and not stuck in tab UI like Excel. You would be able to embed them separately in the page so multiple worksheets could be viewed at the same time. Example: you might have multiple small worksheets with financial summaries where the columns are slightly different. You could also do things like include text above/below worksheets, to present the data in a document-like format.
This is how Apple's Numbers.app works.