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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

I'm yet to find a single decent alternative to Excel. It's an excellent data modeling and analysis tool.

And yes, I've learned Python, R and SQL, but these tools are not a replacement for the Excel workflow.

I was coming here to say this. Nothing compares to Excel. The problem with replacing Excel is that it has thousands of features, and every user seems to use a different subset of those features.

With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.

I still have basic problems sometimes with trying to copy out of google sheets. It is unpredictable.

Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend.

I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.

I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.

That was exactly my experience around two years ago. The brand of the company was far, far more valuable than their internal processes or capabilities as a result, and it was a painful migration (still is, from what I hear).

It's hard to describe why Excel is so good at what it does. The only way I can think to describe it is "the most amount of power for the least amount of work."

I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.

I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.

They are big enough for their contracts to enforce usage of something other than the de facto standard.

Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).

The more likely outcome is continued use of Office at vendor interfaces.

Did you try Airtable?

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/airtable-blocks

It is true, Excel has a wonderful workflow. Something open source with excel workflow combined with R and SQL would be nice.

What features are lacking specifically that LibreOffice, Google Sheets, or some other cross-platform solution doesn't have?

Keyboard shortcuts are huge. Also I’m used to the ribbon which I don’t think they copied yet

The ribbon has a software patent, if I remember correctly. Although it's a UI element, so I'm not sure if it's enforceable?

I am thankful that the ribbon UI is patented, it prevents that terrible experience getting more widely implemented

execution speed would be a big one

Do you have any performance benchmarking to show the difference between Excel and LibreOffice Calc, because my experience LibreOffice is much better on resources. I would like to see what tests you are using so that I can run them myself.

Good products are not just a collection of features.

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