Equals Raises $6.6M from David Sacks at Craft Ventures to Replace Excel

Copy excel shortcuts is smart, but no, this will not replace Excel. Transpile VBA into something like python, automagically open and translate Excel files, and then maybe, MAYBE you'd find a niche of other startups that don't want to integrate with the Microsoft stack. Otherwise, good luck.

>> we all STILL invariably end up back in a tool that was built in the 80’s: Excel.

You lose a lot of goodwill with intentionally misleading statements like this. I'm writing this on a computer, and they were built even earlier than the 80s!

Version control and easy pulling of data... it's a good idea, for sure. But if I were them, I'd be worried that if these turned out to be compelling features, Microsoft would just roll them out in the next release.

Both excel and sheets already do this. connected data in sheets, power query in excel.

so a less mature version of Excel to push a feature that already exists among the behemoths?

Looks neat.

Causal [1] seems to be another option (they also raised funding recently).

[1] https://www.causal.app

I've seen seemingly immortal tech giants die to the newcomer, but MS's office is just too ubiquitous and embedded everywhere. So even if there's a superior excel alternative, who would use it when they already have Excel along with tons of other office tools.

$6.6m doesn't sound like that's a lot of money to make an Excel killer. Also, it looks very much like a spreadsheet to me.

It sounds like if they get any significant traction, it would be trivial for Microsoft to add the equivalent features to Excel.