I really want to hate that project (too much hype and the UI looks like this just another crappy and locked in office suite). That said there is someone out there who is going to get it right. Excel has too major problems:
1. Legacy: newer versions will always need to support VB6 and activeX and all that garbage - that's quite a big drag.
2. Inability to track changes easily. (Just move a table one row down, and it becomes impossible to compare the 2 versions) which causes what people call "spreadsheet risk"
That makes Excel "somewhat" vulnerable to asymmetric marketing attacks. It is in fact surprising that this hasn't happened yet. I think one of the big reasons is that most SV people don't use much Excel (not like we financial guys do)
I'm just hoping that Mike Bostock and the 2 other guys as Observable HQ are going to nail it. I'd much rather have a totally hackable front end that does the DAG for me, than a cloud-based document-editing-with-formulae...
There is no good way to share data between spreadsheets (linked spreadsheets are a nightmare)
There is no good way to link a word or ppt document to a spreadsheet (an extremely common use case, think reports, client presentations). Linked tables are unstable (crash and unstable rendering) and you have to do all sort of hacks to ensure the links are not screwed up if you ever modify one while the other is closed.
Excel should move away from a single grid approach per sheet (Apple’s approach makes a lot of sense).
What is depressing is that outside of ensuring it runs on new platforms, Microsoft pretty much stopped development of new major features 10 years ago. If you look at the past Excel’s what’s new, these are mostly cosmetic/minor/maintenance changes.
1. Legacy: newer versions will always need to support VB6 and activeX and all that garbage - that's quite a big drag.
2. Inability to track changes easily. (Just move a table one row down, and it becomes impossible to compare the 2 versions) which causes what people call "spreadsheet risk"
That makes Excel "somewhat" vulnerable to asymmetric marketing attacks. It is in fact surprising that this hasn't happened yet. I think one of the big reasons is that most SV people don't use much Excel (not like we financial guys do)
I'm just hoping that Mike Bostock and the 2 other guys as Observable HQ are going to nail it. I'd much rather have a totally hackable front end that does the DAG for me, than a cloud-based document-editing-with-formulae...