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.
Excellent. This is a solution to the problem of “spreadsheets are shit”, where they didn’t just try to make a better VisiCalc/Lotus123/Excel/Gnumeric/OpenOffice/etc.
It satisfies a use-case of spreadsheets (turning data entry/processing into a ui) but way more effectively and logically and unambiguously than a spreadsheet.
JupyterLab is another thing worth checking out, if you want to replace the data-crunching notebook aspects of a spreadsheet, but better.