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by wslh 592 days ago
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.
1 comments
antasvara 592 days ago
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.

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wslh 592 days ago
> 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...

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respondo2134 592 days ago
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.
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