What are the usecases for non standard spreadsheets? Ie when does one of libre office, google sheets or excel not suffice that people spend time developing a new spreadsheet software? Honest question..
Regular spreadsheets give you a number of independently configured cells, which gives you maximum flexibility, but becomes inconvenient when you want tables instead: have a fixed structure, enforce column types and validations, implement row-level access control, or join them together.
You can say it’s a type of no-code tool, enabling you to build a CRUD app with a spreadsheet-like interface. Their website even features demos like “lightweight CRM” and “class enrollment”.
Sounds like Microsoft Access
Since code is too hard, most people just abuse Excel, but Access was truly a "no code" solution for many database problems.
There is definitely a market for a good free software featureful spreadsheet tool.
While there is a market for more spreadsheet tools to which I welcome... sadly, it is not just about spreadsheets, it is about Suite/Office tools.
In order for a new spreadsheet killer to stand a chance, it needs to be alongside an Access alternative, Word alternative, etc. Without this, I dont think it will catch up with Microsoft/Google Suites no matter how good it is.
This is why LibreOffice will stick around for quite some time.
I do like LibreOffice and appreciated the work done on it. From memory, it has improved a lot since it branched off OpenOffice. Admittedly, it is not comparable to MS Office.
Focusing on Spreadsheets... MS Excel, compared to LibreOffice Calc, is a smoother experience and easier to use. I would not be suprised if it has more features. I can say the same thing for MS Word vs LibreOffice Writer. I have not used LibreOffice Base but I would not expect it to be as good as MS Access. I dont use them so cannot comment further.
Personally, I would love to see a Spreadsheet program which enables you to write Scheme code behind it, rather than some Excels VBA-like language. Easy to code and extend and automate.
This discussion covers it in more detail: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-create-format-as-table-....
Note: I am not saying there are no true and valid differences one or another person could really rely on. But having worked in IT-support I know that not few people like to give pseudo-rational reasons, when in fact it is often more about feelings. I don't say that feelings/look/design is irrelevant: "I like the design of Excel more", is a totally valid reason for choosing it over Libreoffice. But in the end many people pretend there is more to it. I have yet to encounter a situation that I couldn't resolve using Libreoffice Calcs features (ignoring insane scenarios where writing a well tested script or using an actual database would be the rational option).
People prefer gsheet to calc not because of one big missing functionality, because as you say, you can always find a way. It's more that excel/gsheet makes your life way easier, and saves you a lot of time.
I use both gsheet (for work) and calc (for personal stuff). I really want to give calc a chance so I accept the excess time it takes me to use it, but I understand that some people don't. And I would not say that it's related to "feelings", it's more a problem of "ease of use" and "doing things fast".
Like others, I am having trouble putting my finger on the reason, the best I can do is to say that in Calc my attention was often on the software itself rather than the data. To use Heideggerian terminology, Calc often feels "present-at-hand" whereas with some experience other spreadsheet tools feel "ready-to-hand".
I initially assumed I simply had more experience with Excel and would find Calc just as easy if I spent more time with it. But then I tried Google Sheets and to a lesser extent Apple Numbers and was able to quickly transition from thinking about the tool (present-at-hand) to thinking about my content and tasks (ready-to-hand).
I still have to drop out of my task flow when using an unfamiliar feature in Excel, Sheets, or Numbers but these feel like momentary digressions with the majority of my time spent thinking about the content. With Calc the ratio felt reversed, with the most of my time spent thinking about the tool. (Though I'll admit I have not tried it in several years -- perhaps it has improved since then.)
I wish I could provide more actionable feedback, but I suspect that the best way to pay down some of their design debt would be for Libre Office to conduct usability tests.
One thing that actually has pretty great UX is Apple's Pages (mainly the concept of fine-grained table creation), I'd love it if someone copied that.
The two areas where it makes sense to compete are:
a) Embedding a spreadsheet like (to varying levels of featurefullness) interfaces into other applications or workflows. A minimal feature set probably doesn't even involve formulas, just the UI affordances of a typical spreadsheet (ie it needs to copy and paste like a spreadsheet).
b) You are building something that acts like ms access (or airtable), just aiming for different blends of functionality/freeformness/end user fiddliness.
For me I think it's just the sheer time investment, personally. Spreadsheets give a very easy programming language, no compiler, via Google sheets my phone can run it and my browser can run at and I can link it to someone... All great pros! But then it takes so long to be effective with them.
Give you an example of the last big app that I wrote for a spreadsheet: I have a 2-year-old, she was born a bit underweight with lip/tongue ties that gave her trouble latching, so we chose to do a hybrid breastfeeding/formula approach; we'd use bottles of pumped milk where we could, but if she was too frustrated to latch and we'd already used up the pumped milk we'd break out the baby formula.
But, we knew this was a risk: milk production is in response to demand, when it goes dry you activate more tissues that make more milk later. So I wanted to be able to answer my wife's questions of “is my milk supply getting stronger or drying up, what percentage of her diet was formula, etc.” and my own questions of “did I enter all of yesterday's stuff properly?”
So the spreadsheet is, a Google Form first dumps {
timestamp: date
what: enum('milk', 'formula')
from: enum('mama', 'enfamil', 'costco', 'bottle', 'freezer')
to: enum('waste', 'kid', 'bottle', 'freezer')
oz: decimal
when: nullable(date)
rowID: number
effectiveDate: date
check: boolean
These then get sorted on a following page and chunked by day. Another page allows me to track “how much milk is currently in bottles, how much formula is currently in bottles, how much milk is in the freezer," and an enhanced version on the next page shows me all of the account balances by date. Why these? So that I can answer “did I forget to input some of this milk/formula in my sleep addled state?”. A lot of this tracking was done by using my phone to just take a picture of an amount in a bottle and then piece together what had happened that day later. So it had to be checkable, “this says I have X ounces in the fridge, do I have that?”
The next page just has plain text, these are derivations of mathematical formulas, explanations of the modeling I wanted to do, thinking out loud so that the formula is showing up on the next page are not out of context when I later go to change them.
From the daily balances finally we get the models. Some ways I do this are to use a binomial distribution to smooth the data that I've got, with noisy data that can be a little bit easier than independent data points. I also tried some autoregression modeling to try and predict, with error bars, “today, tomorrow, the day after” for the binomial smoothing. I wanted to do this for three series which ended up being "total fluids kid has consumed, total milk pumped into either bottles or freezer bags, and formula: consumed milk ratio.” but this required a lot of iteration over different things that I might have wanted to try to graph before I could answer the questions that I really wanted to.
So I then like to plot line graphs where the data points are little X's, there are two dotted fit lines, one with the error from the model added, the other with the error from the model subtracted, so you get this kind of snake of error envelope that is just a running average in the middle but “opens its mouth” at the end, so that I am not telling a story that is not supported by the error bars given only the past couple days' data. If the entire snakehead is pointing up then yes, “your supply looks to be getting stronger this week!” but otherwise “it's still a bit early to say but here's what the story was three or four days ago.”
When I describe this to you it doesn't sound like a very complicated app, right? But writing it in a spreadsheet, which I needed so that I could input data or correct it from my phone at 3am, made this a very slow process, hours and hours were sunk into this tracking spreadsheets to get them where I needed them to be. And that's the big problem is that spreadsheets are kind of an “assembly language” level of solution where you have individual cells/registers that you have to track and update and coordinate, but the system doesn't connect everything together semantically so you have to express every single relationship yourself and then auto fill columns and whatever else to make it work.