The Next Generation of Spreadsheets is Here
By: Jake Mito
Tags: Spreadsheets, Excel, Python, Data Science

The spreadsheet may be the greatest piece of software ever made. The combination of flexibility, visualness, and simplicity are unparalleled. As with all domains of software, market requirements change over time. Excel faces some large problems around speed, data sizes, collaboration and repeatability. This doesn’t mean that Excel is going away, but it does mean that new software is filling the gaps — and with Excel’s market size, these gaps are oceanic.

Layer

Layer aims to place much needed collaboration features on top of Excel. By adding:

Versioning

Track Changes

Granular access sharing

and more

Layer allows for more sophisticated spreadsheet workflows to take place. A product manager can manage a spreadsheet by giving access of one portion to the marketer, one portion to the engineer, and one portion to finance, without having to worry about overriding and overlapping work.

taken from golayer.io

Cube

Cube simply posits that the flexibility of spreadsheets is good but their size is bad. Trying to work with more than 100k lines of data in Excel is soul crushing. Instead of shoveling a huge data source into a spreadsheet, why not slap a flexible spreadsheet front-end on top of your huge data source?

You can apply cube to your Salesforce, Quickbooks, Netsuite and other databases and analyze the data like its in a spreadsheet. Cube actually covers your existing portfolio of spreadsheets as well, so you can see all of your dense database data and loose spreadsheet data in the same view.

Here is a still from the demo video on Cube’s website. Don’t look at the cube too long — it plays tricks on your eyes.

spreadsheet.com

I’ll be honest — It is a confusing product name. I don’t know if its called “spreadsheet.com” to highlight that is a cloud spreadsheet, or if its called “spreadsheet” and they just got a great website name.

Regardless, this product is all about reimagining the tabular form of the spreadsheet. It features different “views” that are not native to Excel or google sheets.

You can view your data in:

Sheet view

Gantt View

Kanban View

Form View

This link gives a demo of each of the views.

Here is what Gantt view looks like on https://www.spreadsheet.com/product

Do I think this view obfuscates the underlying data a bit? Not for me to say, but spreadsheet.com’s reimagining of how we visualize spreadsheet data is definitely something to keep an eye on as the product evolves.

You can get early access here.

Zoho Sheet:

Zoho takes a different tact than the rest of the tools on this list. They realized that spreadsheet users often do the same repeated tasks. No more!

Zoho automates:

pivot tables

chart creation

remove duplicates

fill missing values

taken from https://www.zoho.com/sheet/

It also comes with an AI assistant named Zia, of whom you can ask questions like “Monthly sum of sales?”

I have not had the pleasure of meeting Zia yet, so I don’t know how well the AI works. If it’s more like Siri and less like Comcast automated service reps, this could be a huge time saver.

Mito (I helped build this btw )

All the previous tools try to solve the gaps in spreadsheet tooling with more spreadsheets. Mito believes that there is another whale of a piece of software that can fix these problems: Python!

Mito is a spreadsheet front-end for Python. Every edit you make in the Mito front-end will generate the equivalent Python. This means you can use large data sets, really quickly, and with ultimate opportunities for repeatability and scalability.

Mito allows you to use Python without needing to know how to code.

In Mito you can:

Filter

Pivot

Merge

Sort

Use Formulas

Create Charts

and more

Here is Mito featured on the Data Professor Youtube Channel:

I hope to discuss the categories of spreadsheet innovation way more in future posts :) Leave a comment if you have any neat spreadsheet tools you know of!