Microsoft 365 Dev Blog

It quietly became a thing you could open a spreadsheet from a network share, and so could someone else, and both live-edit it in realtime with markers for where each other is. Not just two people, either. Then gained that with SharePoint cloud backing which means the people don't need to be on the same LAN. And gained a web version which can be scripted in JavaScript instead of Visual Basic for Applications, and so desktop and web users can open, view, edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. With the Microsoft365 backing, someone can @ you in an Excel cell and M365 will email you about it to alert you. Spreadsheets are accessible from the MS Graph API and with a REST interface[1] which means they can be generated and updated from code while on M365, it means Excel can be used as a backend calculation engine in a supported way now (instead of running it headless on a server in an unsupported way), and spreadsheets integrate with PowerAutomate[2].

As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over…

The chasm is enormous, but Calc doesn't need to implement 100% of Excel's functionality when most people - even business/power users - don't use all of its features.

What major commonly used features do you reckon Excel has that hasn't been implemented in LO Calc yet, that would be a deal-breaker for most businesses?

To my knowledge, Calc has implemented most of Excel's formulae (well over 500 in total count), so at least for typical spreadsheet functionality you wouldn't missing anything.

The biggest limitation I can think of is the limited support for VBA, but Microsoft have already announced VBA's deprecation[1], so no one should be relying on it even in MS World.

And whilst LO's own Basic scripting is... basic, it also supports rich scripting and full automation via Python and Javascript. It even has a full-fledged SDK for developing addins/extensions using a high-level language like C++/Java etc[2], so businesses who're dependent on some random proprietary excel COM addin or something could invest in development effort to port it over.

Heck, if businesses are so inclined, they could modify the LO source itself and build a custom version to add the features they want - that's the beauty of FOSS.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/how-to-prepare-vba-projects-for-vbscript-deprecation/

[2] https://api.libreoffice.org/

What makes Excel's Javascript API Excel specific is their schema for providing type information with the data. Such as:

const myDate =
{
type: Excel.CellValueType.formattedNumber,
basicValue: 32889.0,
numberFormat: "m/d/yyyy"
};

That's more Excel focused than a CSV export would be. I don't see any specifics about the API implementation but they may be using this in the provided JSON data. Maybe those average ISK prices for commodities are provided with more decimal digits, but with formatting to display two digits, etc.

Excel add-ins and data types: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/ignite-2021-excel-add-ins-and-data-types/

EVE Online and Data Type APIs: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/data-types-in-space-a-new-data-types-experience/ba-p/3328453