For decades, spreadsheets are the least sexy form of consumer software. Necessary? Sure. How important is it to the fatigue of running a business, doing your bank, or figuring out a financial plan? 100 percent.
But one interesting thing, renew technology section? Oh no. If you are a young developer who has been popular in recent years, you have flocked to the hyperoxygenated fields of Silicon Valley, such as WHO or electronic money or different amputees metaversii. You have not accessed the spreadsheet. It was gray felt suit territory.
This means that for decades, very little effort has gone into advanced this respectable piece of office furniture. Yes, Google order spreadsheet online in 2006 (by acquiring a company that had already done so), and in 2012 Airtable launched a kind of intelligent transformation of databases and spreadsheets. But those are the exceptions. For the most part, startups are content to let Excel and Sheets be the 100-pound gorillas that dominate the user base of about 2 billion people who use spreadsheets. And users are generally quite happy with Excel and Sheets.
Except this makes this neglected field a chance, too, right? Not many software categories have a planet-wide user base, but very few programmers try to exploit new features.
Suddenly, the field began to bloom. Over the past year, a small group of startups have released spreadsheet products — such as Rows, Spreadsheet.com and Grist — with new robotic superpowers, like automatically moving data from pages to pages. another web page, or send an email when the logic in the formula fires. In a strange way, they took spreadsheets and turned them into useful, all-purpose bots – made of rows and columns.
All of these new offerings stem from a core observation by their inventors, that spreadsheets are now used for more than confusing numbers. Today, people use them as an alternative organizing tool: They create to-do lists inside spreadsheets, wedding planningAnalyze the best possible Magic decks, and run fantasy football teams.
“Initially, spreadsheets were designed for accounting and calculation purposes, but they are increasingly becoming a kind of standard way in which we organize all of data,” as Matt Robinson, CEO of Spreadsheet.com, speak to me. In fact, when he and his co-founder, Murali Mohan, surveyed business people using Excel or Google Sheets, they found that half the time people don’t write formulas or numbers in their sheet. They don’t do any math. They are just making lists.
(Even more funny, some spreadsheet users don’t even recognize you maybe do math inside them. When Robinson and his wife hired a contractor to build their house, he showed them a spreadsheet of costs – but then pulled out a calculator to manually calculate the figures. When Robinson showed him how the spreadsheet could do it automatically, he was greatly appreciated.)
So the new sheet section is designed to break away from pure math and move on to this”organize your stuff” Constan. Spreadsheets.com, for example, allows the user to render almost anything into a single cell. Drop an image or PDF into a cell and the product will instantly generate a thumbnail, which you can then expand, as if the spreadsheet were some kind of blog content management system. Most of these new products also allow users to connect their worksheets to other Internet services, so they can remove information from other websites or issue alerts if data changes.
