If we want people to move away from proprietary platforms, we need to offer something better, not just something that’s free.
I’m not happy with LibreOffice which seems to just playing catch-up with what Microsoft did 5 years ago. While there’s quite a few alternatives to Word for most people’s uses, the alternative to Excel has been LibreOffice Calc (or actual coding with CSV, Python or R).
So when I discovered Grist today, I was excited. A modern user interface, open source and formulas from Python instead of Excel’s formulas which always seem to do create some weird error.
I’m just sharing in the hope that others will like it as well.
However, I doubt I’ll ever use it: Emacs’ built-in capabilities for spreadsheets using org-mode are on par with Grist for a single person. Organizations would benefit from the ability to limit what single employees can view on a master spreadsheet, though.
And for any friends using vim, sc-im might be of interest. Here’s a review by Tavis Ormandy, even!