Every 3rd-party approach is trying to replicate Excel's featureset and maintain compatibility of excel. That means any of Excel's idiosyncracies must be copied as well.
A re-think of the spreadsheet to be a little closer to a SQL database (but still layman-friendly) would be far more sensible. I wish something like Lotus Improv had won.
> A re-think of the spreadsheet to be a little closer to a SQL database (but still layman-friendly) would be far more sensible.
You could probably get there by cutting features out of Excel -- Excel has a lot of database-like features that can mitigate some of the problems of using it, the problem is that most of the people using it to what is easiest and most discoverable for the UI -- or what they learned as a power user 20 years ago, or learned cargo-cult fashion from (perhaps through intermediaries) someone who learned then -- so a lot of the features that are more clear and maintainable are rarely used.
i.e., the next time I encounter a spreadsheet in my work that I didn't design that uses column names in named tables for references rather than row/column references will be the first.
A re-think of the spreadsheet to be a little closer to a SQL database (but still layman-friendly) would be far more sensible. I wish something like Lotus Improv had won.