Why We Don’t Replace Excel, but Expand its Usefulness
Not long ago ReadWriteWeb wrote correctly that eXpresso expands and extends Excel, noting:
“They extend Excel rather than trying to replace it. That works in the real world. Apart from early adopters with relatively simple spreadsheets, people are comfortable with Excel. It works well, it is extensible, it is easy to use. In an enterprise setting the cost of Excel compared to the functionality is a complete non-issue. But Excel’s native collaboration tools are weak and emailing versions around gets to be a real pain when you get to 3 or more contributors; that introduces errors in what can be mission critical applications.”
This was an astute observation. That exactly describes how eXpresso works.
In the real world, Excel has become the standard for spreadsheets. People use it because it works for them. It’s robust. It’s proven. It’s got all the features businesspeople need.
Why try to replace that?
We looked carefully at all the features and determined how to transform Excel for the 21st Century – for the way businesses work today. Teams are spread out. They are all over the country, sometimes all over the globe. And with email inboxes so clogged these days, it’s nice not to have to constantly search to find the latest document.
Those are the kind of simple problems we set out to solve, making Excel easier to use by distributed teams and easier to collaborate within. We did not set out to replace Excel, but we did intend to make it better for businesses.
Excel is an excellent way to show the world how to use business tools. I have more than 10 business math tools on my website that were originally
Excel worksheets. Thanks to a simple program that converted my spreadsheets to javascript they are the foundation of my web site on business analysis.