[anyfactor]

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.

[nhatcher]

I think I understand the cult part of Excel. And to be honest, Excel is a fantastic tool. I don't think IronCalc can ever replace Excel (a boy can dream though!). But many companies need a spreadsheet of sorts they can embed in their product. Allow me a bit of humour:

> Any sufficiently complicated startup or young company contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of 10% of Excel.

Maybe we can use IronCalc for those cases?

[bwanab]

> > Any sufficiently complicated startup or young company contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of 10% of Excel.

Let's give Philip Greenspun due credit for this phrase. I'm going to guess there's at least one generation who isn't familiar with it.

[nhatcher]

I was tired when I wrote that. I think I just assumed everyone would get that reference

[mritchie712]

as a saas founder, I can confirm you are 100% correct about this and we'll be looking at IronCalc for https://www.definite.app/

[Alifatisk]

I have to mention this, when scrolling through the website, as soon as the Lakehouse illustration to the right renders, it degrades the performance on my MBP, the browser even starts to stutter!

[mritchie712]

Thanks for the feedback, on it!

[jeffreyq]

cool and slick website. reminds me of linear.app but when i attempt to scroll all the way down it lags. i'm on macbook air with chrome browser

[alsetmusic]

I was viewing in Safari on an M1 Max MBP with no lag. Read this and switched to Chrome and confirmed lag when scrolling. Also lagged returning upward.

It was the only page open in Chrome, freshly launched specifically for this test. Safari has a bajillion open windows and tabs. Something about how Chrome handles the page is definitely odd.

Just for fun, I also tested in Firefox, which was already open with fifteen windows, most of which have a handful of tabs. No lag there.

[mritchie712]

Got it, any chance you could send me the version of Chrome?

This has been tricky to reproduce.

[alsetmusic]

It didn't lag when I loaded and tested just now to grab the version of Chrome: 122.0.6261.129. Presumably, that's because I'd visited earlier. I don't want to reset Chrome to try to repro again.

I did load up Chromium to check it and got the lag there as well: 124.0.6359.0 (Developer Build)

I don't use Chrome almost ever. Maybe my outdated version is why you can't repro.

[jeffreyq]

Version 130.0.6723.92 (Official Build) (arm64)

[diegolas]

chrome on a celeron laptop, barely if any lag

[atoav]

Excel is powerful, but it is also important to consider its limitations.

Things will get real when your orgs problems/needs grow from something that was totally cool to do with spreadsheets to something requiring higher complexity, performance, resilience, testability, coordination, ... — and the point at which you cross over into the latter is not always clearly marked.

It would for example not be advisable to use Excel sheets as a replacement for a distributed database of central importance, unless your org is a lemonade stand with 3 employees.

I would also prefer maintaining a python script with written tests over maintaining an Excel file containing complex business logic, but maybe that is just personal perference.

Don't get me wrong here, Excel is amazing and we should all use it where it shines. But as with all tools we need to be aware of the fact that they heavily color the way we look at problems, as expressed by Maslows famous aphorism: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

Good engineers should not be blinded by their tools, but accutly aware of their limitations and know which to use when. Just like with hand tools you could probably also just hammer a nail in using a shovel or "drill" a hole using a screwdriver and Excel is very versatile in those regards: it can get you very far without being the best solution, a bit like a swiss pocket knife.

[zitterbewegung]

You are totally correct but, pragmatically excel can be used as a prototyping system for nearly every business and if you need to have higher complexity you port it into a Python script. This is not unheard of and I think it's a common pattern. When you have your business analysts already getting something that works its much better than having a set of meetings trying to discuss what the needs are from the business.

[atoav]

Yeah but that is what I meant with the right tools. Anybody would agree that drafting your application on a big whiteboard or a piece of paper might be totally acceptable.

But running your entire org on a single whiteboard or a piece of paper only works up to a certain size and comes with downsides as the org grows. Same thing goes for one big excel file where people have to take turns with editing.

[respondo2134]

I get what you're saying, and agree with lots of it, but most of the time things built in Excel are not for programmers, usually have no maintenance budgeted, and often are built by non-developers.

To extend your analogy too far, Excel is the 4mm allen key you get with all your Ikea furniture. It's good enough to build all the bog-standard, functional but not particularly nice furniture you need, but sure you'd rather have bespoke custom work. Sometimes you don't have or want the tools, or know how to use them and that's OK.

[atoav]

Which is precisely my opinion as well. My post was a caveat, nothing against Excel at all.

[no_wizard]

What would be nice though is if you could export logic from excel to examine it and port it.

One can dream

[stackskipton]

You easily could. Format is available.

What I found is such tools barely work because what makes Excel so sticky is ability for end user to change that logic. X + Y = Z. Well, Click Clack and Z -Y = F

That's just so difficult to handle in a way that isn't "Just use Excel"

[wombatpm]

Diffs in source control would be sweet

[no_wizard]

They already know how to do it too https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/compare-two-versi...

[delusional]

> 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.

Heh, where were you 6 month ago when my team was pitching some of our traders on replacing a system they'd built for balancing their strategy. It was built in excel of course, but what surprised me was the resistance to changing it at all. They all hated the thing, it was slow and crashed often, and right in the middle of the difficult part of the work too. Working with it was a terrible experience, even for people used to medium business enterprise crap. Yet they refused to consider any alternative to building some CRUD around it that would extract the worst parts.

The issue we faced was that there was no way we could contribute to this excel monster while still following the risk tolerance of our department. It's not that we're opposed to building something that is probably a bad idea, if it helps build relationships that let us build something better later. It's more that as soon as IT touches it, we get to own every legal aspect of it too. So they ended up with an external consultant that built them what was essentially an external database they could query, which was then supplied with data by some program somewhere.

It ended exactly as you say. They got a back-office firm to develop some one-off hack that alleviated the immediate problem, without replacing excel.

[antasvara]

I think this highlights the main issue with replacing Excel, which is that most people have an undocumented, informal workflow with their tools in Excel that would be difficult to replicate fully in other software.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

As someone that has had other software tools replaced with alternatives (think Slack replaced with Teams), the new solution almost always speeds up and fixes a lot of problems. It also invariably screws up at least one thing that I need the tool to do as a part of my job.

I love my IT colleagues, but (and I mean no offense to them or other IT folks) they don't understand that the way we use our internal tools is super flexible and doesn't adhere to an end to end process. It's how we ended up with an entire software platform that takes more manual steps, breaks in a way that we can't fix, and still requires the use of Excel to get the output into the formats that our stakeholders need. It also can't adapt quickly when we need to change things in our process.

It is a technically impressive tool that does the things they designed it to do super well. But we're like a month away from needing an Excel tool (or another piece of software) that can reliably do all the things we didn't realize relied on the "hot spacebar" from the XKCD.

[skissane]

Outside of specific domains such as finance and accounting, most people don’t really need Excel, and will be served perfectly well by Google Sheets or whatever.

Indeed, I have hardly used Excel in years. I do use Google Sheets at work, where they are used for adhoc tracking by engineering, product management, project managers, etc.

Our son who is 11, he uses Google Sheets - and I know he has used Apple Numbers in the past too. I’m not sure if he even knows what Excel is.

[respondo2134]

I think people conflate Excel the product with workflows that can be solved with Excel. Lots of tools like sheets and even numbers can do the latter, but nothing since Lotus competed with the former.

So if you've never used Excel, you can probably get away with an alternative. But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

[dleeftink]

I'm a heavy Excel user, and I have yet to find a usecase that cannot be solved in Sheets. It has App Script after all, for whenever you run into a feature that isn't there. But even then, I've translated many Excel functions to native Sheets array_formula equivalents, and found the latter much more ergonomic.

[no_wizard]

Much of Excels dominance is due to its legacy pervasiveness in certain industries/ roles (notably finance or financial related but there’s strong bureaucratic use of it as well asan ad-hoc tracking tool for instance) and the fact that two generations of people grew up using it.

I’ve noticed over the years that younger generations are far more used to using Google Sheets since schools and universities have strong adoption of Google Workspace. As a result, I’ve seen less and less use cases that were once believed to be Excel only domains turn out not to be.

I’m not going to proclaim the death of Excel by any means but it’s not as ironclad of a leader position as it once was. There is however some increasingly niche cases where Excel can do things that Sheets can’t, or doesn’t do as well. One non obvious (for todays environment) use case being offline portability, Excel being a standalone program really helps here.

That said, they both suffer from one issue that’s the same, which is there is no ergonomic way to run business logic rules over the calculations easily (and some cases at all)

[proamdev123]

What do you mean by “run business logic rules over the calculations”? Genuine question.

Don’t most people embed business logic into their spreadsheet formulas?

Or is there something else you’re referring to?

[no_wizard]

It’s not uncommon for the sums of the spreadsheet to get fed into other systems or even spreadsheets.

There being validation around that can significantly reduce errors, such as checking totals against system values etc.

[danm]

Maybe it has changed, but last time I tried to use numbers it still didn’t support resolving circular references through iterative calculation.

[infoseek12]

There are lots of cases in businesses where there are integrations with other software that are difficult to port.

[mikeyouse]

Mostly in jest but the use case where Sheets falls over for me is copying formulas to the right…

[skissane]

> But if you already know Excel, why would you add another product for some subset of use cases?

I know Excel – I've been using Excel since before Sheets existed. First spreadsheet I ever used was Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (I was just a kid at the time, so I was just mucking around with it, not using it in anger – but I remember watching my father use it in anger.)

At my work everyone gets Sheets, whereas you only get an Excel license if you specifically request one – and most people don't. So why would I use the product which most of my colleagues don't have, instead of the product everybody has?

Likewise on my personal laptop, I have an Excel license... and still I use Sheets for most things. Habit maybe? I've never used the web-based Excel, and I don't like having to deal with open another app.

The only time I ever use Excel nowadays is if I need to open some complex Excel spreadsheet that Sheets can't handle properly, or if I need to work on some Excel spreadsheet import/export function at work – both of which are "once in a blue moon" activities for me.

[alsetmusic]

I've only watched an Excel expert work their magic in person once and it was straight up sorcery. I'm glad not to need to learn it, but it was eye-opening seeing her rapidly make changes (with me not understanding what she was doing, sorta how non-experts likely perceive what we do when we help them with their personal devices) and come out with exactly what she wanted. Must have taken her about a minute and there were changes every several seconds until she was done.

Black magic in the hands of an experienced user.

[wrs]

In the case of Google Sheets, one reason is that collaborative editing in M365 Excel is absolutely awful. It’s slow, clunky, and more importantly loses data. If you have a shared spreadsheet with important data in it, it’s worth switching.

I’ve worked with a “prototype CRM” that was just a big Google Sheet. Basically a lead generation form would add a row to the sheet, and the sales team would edit cells to reflect the state of the sale. It grew to 3 million rows and still worked. Doing that in Excel is a laughable idea.

I’ve also been on a management team where compensation planning was done with ten managers editing a shared Excel sheet with just a few hundred rows. Somehow some rows got deleted and others got slightly scrambled during the process. It was a huge mess.

[wslh]

As an expert in Excel, don’t you think Google Sheets has chipped away at Excel's dominance in a very smart way? I’m not saying that Google Sheets is a complete competitor to Excel, but it has been highly user-oriented. And, if we add Apple Numbers to this discussion, I feel it’s still at a kindergarten level by comparison.

I think this is where IronCalc like software could thrive: finding a non-complete competition to Excel, and Google Sheets that does the other part of the work better.

[antasvara]

What Google Sheets did that was super innovative IMO was make a spreadsheet that integrates with the entire Google ecosystem.

I am partially joking (they put it on the cloud in a way that's super useful and made collaboration remotely easier, along with other scripting inprovements), but I think it highlights that the main "benefit" to Sheets is that it's a fully featured product created by a mega-corporation that complements other tools they have to offer.

Put another way: how many companies use Microsoft for everything except Excel? How does that compare to companies that use Google Drive for everything except for spreadsheets?

A tool like this one has the upward battle of needing to be so useful, it is worth employing alongside your currently existing office software. It feels like spreadsheet software is a particularly hard arena to compete in, given the quality of the major ones you mentioned.

[wslh]

> It feels like spreadsheet software is a particularly hard arena to compete in, given the quality of the major ones you mentioned.

It’s not just a feeling. A basic Porter’s analysis, especially with a 6th force, reveals how nearly impossible it is to compete effectively (now) in the spreadsheet software market given the dominance of the major players.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysi...

[respondo2134]

a killer feature of Sheets is querying web-based databases for adhoc reporting. You can do this lots of ways including Excel, but sheets was early and makes it very easy. I've saved so much development effort (in Excel or elsewhere) just dumping data into a sheet and letting them at it.

[dudus]

As a long time Google sheets user I recently was involved in a project for one of these Excel heavy enterprises.

I proposed the CRUD solution to complement their use case but the solution was not received well. They couldn't allocate computer resources to host the solution within their infra easily. So they pushed back and asked us to develop some Excel add-on, PowerBI based dashboard or some kind of Microsoft no code I can't care enough to remember the name.

I had no experience with PowerBI at all. But had a lot of fun learning about it. Great ideas on that piece of software but ultimately it's too hard for Excel users and too finicky for real data processing other than very simple stuff.

It failed spectacularly in the end. We could never make it work reliably and the customer also skimped on the license and didn't want to add some extra features M$ft charges on the side such as power automate and some "advanced instances". Which meant the software runs have to be manually triggered on the managers machine to update the dashboards. It was nasty.

The end result is completely unmaintainable. A collection of "M" scripts inside a power bi dashboard, it pulled data from multiple spreadsheets from specific locations, joined and processed the data, and generated reports. The scripts runs on a Thinkpad so it needs to fit inside the machine constraints of memory and processing. Some of the files are manually updated so very easy to mess up the format or permissions to the point the whole thing broke.

It was a cool experience I'm never repeating

[steine65]

This mirrors my experience. I am the accounting manager responsible for updating these dashboards at my saas employer. Troubleshooting powerbi errors during month-end close is the most stress-inducing thing. And whenever management wants a dashboard edit, we have to somehow know that the spreadsheets being fed the powerbi cloud data will also change. Maybe an extra row inserted into the pivot table of ARR by product. Now any formulas directly referencing the cells rather than using XLOOKUP are pointing to the wrong product category. I was chewed out hard for that one a few days ago even though IT made that change, since it updated our report after review. TLDR: Powerbi suck, use a data warehouse and SQL for data transformations.

[analog31]

I think that experienced Excel users and managers don't expect Excel to be perfect, but have figured out how to cost the inevitable bugs and changes into their expectations, to a good enough level of accuracy.

Nobody knows how long a software project will take, if it will deliver something that works or not, and if responsive support will materialize. Many if not most developers agree with this, even if they disagree as to the root causes.

One way to think of it is that it's a difference between a person and a process. A spreadsheet can be created and maintained by a person -- often the end user themselves. But since most people don't program, getting software written and maintained requires a process.

The same is true of driving a car versus flying in an airplane. When you drive, you feel like you're the person who's in control of getting yourself to your destination. When you fly, you're placing yourself at the mercy of processes that you don't control and that are not all aligned with your interests.

[mmooss]

> 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.

That is a universal issue of IT management: Any change implemented in IT systems (or anything else) will get that kind of resistance - bigger changes cause more resistance. If you change their primary tool, which they use all day and on which their jobs depend, expect a lot of resistance. The solutions:

1) Get management buy-in. They set the ceiling for acceptance - very few underlings will have more interest or make more effort than their management; if the manager dislikes it, doesn't use it, is disinterested, etc., then most others will do the same. Also, management is your support - when someone objects, they are not just objecting to you, they are objecting to their manager.

2) Get user buy-in. This is perfectly reasonable, if you think about it: Their tools, they use the tool all day, their jobs, probably they should have the biggest say. It means obtaining and utilizing their input from the start on what the tool should and should not do, etc. It may not be what you planned or expect; it may shatter your dreams; that's good - your fantasy was not aligned with reality. They provide the user end (e.g., 'don't change the keyboard UI that is in all our muscle memory and in all our documentation, and automated in macros'; 'of course you are migrating our macros, on which we depend, right?!'), you provide the technical end (e.g., 'we need a database with a spreadsheet UI and not a file-based spreadsheet').

3) Use all your development skills: test, mvp, deploy, iterate, etc.

4) Use some social intelligence: Deliver to the most interested, capable users first. Others will see them being uber-productive and want one too. Provide everyone with incredible, highly responsive support. Etc.

[cyrialize]

My first career was at a fintech company that sold auditing data. All of our clients were accountants, auditors, lawyers, etc.

Every single person worked in Excel. It didn't matter how old our website was, how crappy our code was - all that matter was that we generated a CSV.

I used Excel often - I think many people underestimate how powerful Excel is and how much of finance / auditing relies upon it.

My co-workers used to joke that the world runs on Excel. That some of the most important economic documents are probably some .xlsx file named "economy-v3" that people send back and forth over email.

[manvillej]

I feel like any solution that replaces excel must solve a larger problem outside the scope of the spreadsheet.

Data intake, preprocessing, solving performance limitations, executing automated decisions.

If it’s just a “better excel” it’s not better enough.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

I would very much use a product that would work exactly like Google spreadsheets, web and all, but would be self-hosted.

[magusor]

Have you tried collabora office and/or onlyoffice ? These could match your need.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Yes and it is atrocious compared to Google Spreadsheets, unfortunately.

[magusor]

Yes, they are indeed not as streamlined unfortunately. Maybe ethercalc if you need something lightweight, but that's also not a real alternative https://ethercalc.net/

[ochrist]

I use NextCloud with Collabora Online (hosted and trimmed down version of LibreOffice). All self-hosted.

[paulddraper]

Hardly.

Google Sheets is used for all sorts of things.

Does it REPLACE Excel? No, not fully. But a lot of the time, it does.