As we mentioned in a previous article, many enterprises start their IT business with a form.

Not only data storage, but also information sharing among teams relies on tables as data structures. Documents, reports, vouchers and summary calculations of basic data are mostly analyzed and made in the form of tables. Even though the application scenarios of tables have been very extensive, with the development of business, users can still put forward higher requirements for the performance and system compatibility of table products, which also forces the continuous optimization and iteration of table products.

When it comes to table products, Excel is the most typical one. Today, we stand in the position of system users, enterprise decision makers and developers, through the evolution history of Excel, observe the development and demand iteration of table products, which application scenarios are covered by table products in the current business, and how to use “table technology” to improve enterprise productivity.

First, the iterative process of Excel is the evolution of user needs

In 1978, Harvard Business School student Daniel Bricklin wanted to create a program that would simplify the tedious recalculation of a revised financial budget. He asked his programmer friend Robert Frankston to help him.

Bricklin received the request and wrote a demonstration program, VisiCalc, in BASIC for the Apple 2, which at the time had 24 bytes of memory. It was also the first software to use row layout for number entry and calculation, which was simple but already had the row model at the heart of today’s spreadsheets.

At a time when people were doing business using notes on books, it was very inefficient, so VisiCalc was immediately loved. It was also the software that helped launch the MAC 2, which sold like crazy. Mr. Jobs said in an interview that year that spreadsheets helped the industry grow and that VisiCalc was responsible for Apple’s success.

Although today’s aesthetic and user operation habits, its interface is extremely unfriendly, but it solves the problem of spreadsheet, so that data table information processing becomes possible, and can even be called the originator of productivity tools software.

But VisiCalc is too “simple.”

In 1983, a spreadsheet software called Lotus, which added simple charts, a database, and some basic formulas to VisiCalc, was released exclusively on IBM PCS and compatible MS-DOS operating systems. With better hardware and operating systems, as well as improvements in its own interactions, Lotus gradually swallowed the market for VisiCalc and soon became the first software in the world to sell more than a million units.

Behind the change in market share is the change in user demand. As a productivity tool, tabular products are never about simply presenting data. So it was inevitable that VisiCalc would be replaced by Lotus, and that Lotus would later be replaced by Excel.

Excel’s predecessor, a piece of software called Muliplan, was born at the same time as Lotus. However, Muliplan took a bit too big a step, and its high threshold of use made it unpopular in the tool market, and eventually it died out by itself. But it also led Microsoft to decide to reinvent its spreadsheet software, which became known as Excel.

Excel remains a local data analytics wizard today because it pioneered the use of custom interfaces (including fonts, text attributes, and cell formats) and introduced “smart recalculation” that updates only the data associated with the cell when it changes. Traditional tabulating software could only recalculate all the data or wait for the next command. It can be said that Excel is also the interface leader of data information processing.

However, with the development of the Internet, people have more expectations for data table tools, such as online functions based on cloud services and enterprise-level collaboration requirements, which is a focus at the present stage.

Looking back, we can see that the iterative history of table tools is actually an evolutionary history of user needs. And the reason table tools remain so strong is precisely because there is a constant demand for data processing.

Ii. What are the new requirements for smart office scenarios of modern enterprises?

After reviewing the history, let’s look to the future. If you could redesign a table tool, what would it look like?

As we mentioned above, cloud-based online capabilities and enterprise-level collaboration requirements are the focus of the next phase of data tools. In an enterprise-level online collaborative office scenario, I think data should have three main attributes:

  • A Shared property
  • Contextualized attributes
  • The efficiency of attribute

The first is shared properties. Sharing actually contains two dimensions — terminal sharing and sharing between people.

The concept of the Internet of Things has become popular in recent years, and the Internet of everything is considered to be the next important development direction in the information age. Data, as a kind of flowing information resource, needs to be spread among different people and displayed and operated on different terminals, so as to break the barriers between different hardware and scenarios and make the collaboration of data information more convenient and efficient.

The second is the contextualized property.

As we mentioned above, data can be derived and applied to different physical and business scenarios. Different physical scenarios require the table tool to enhance the shared properties to facilitate multi-end adaptation. In business scenarios, the dimensions, forms and relevance of data are different. We need to use tools to perform secondary processing on the data itself, so as to amplify the value of the data and optimize the user experience.

The third is efficiency.

Efficiency is the core of productivity tools. As a creative interface data analysis tool, Excel has provided users with a very comprehensive and extensive operation modes and functions. However, there is still some room for specific efficiency improvement, such as data visualization, data processing performance, and interactive logic when multiple people cooperate.

Therefore, in order to truly realize smart office, enterprises should not only focus on the internal employee culture, but also provide strong support for the underlying technical capabilities. The form tool itself is born for productivity, if it can really meet the needs of current users, then smart office is a natural thing.

Third, tools based on “table technology” will greatly improve the productivity of enterprises

As we learned above, spreadsheets are still the most important productivity tool in the enterprise. How to choose a suitable data form tool has become one of the difficult problems for many enterprises. The business form and the industry of the enterprise are all the influencing factors.

Most of the table collaborative tool platforms in the market provide universal functions and products, which cannot fully meet the personalized needs of enterprises. If an enterprise really has a strong business need for data forms, it can completely build a functional module in its OA system that is more vertical in function and more suitable for its business form and data requirements.

However, before choosing independent research and development, please be sure to consider the following factors: model, experience, performance, research and development difficulty, later maintenance and business level. For most enterprises, these factors are economic and energy costs that can not be ignored. In addition, the form product looks very simple, but it actually involves a lot of technical implementation, and it is easy for the team without relevant development experience to “work hard and do not please”.

In order to avoid spending a lot of development energy but only get a “chicken rib product”, the r and D director of the enterprise will not easily build the wheel, because it is much easier to choose a more professional form components for integration than independent research and development. Today, most of the table document collaboration products on the market have been developed based on SpreadJS, and many well-known enterprises and manufacturers in the industry have started to use SpreadJS to improve their data table services.

SpreadJS is a pure front-end table control independently developed by Grape City of Xi ‘an. Its interface and functions are highly similar to Excel, but it is not limited to Excel, but focuses on the future of smart office scenarios. With its API and secondary extension capabilities, SpreadJS enables data processing to be independent of hardware, operating systems and usage environments, helping enterprises to achieve more efficient online reporting and multi-person collaboration.

SpreadJS helps SaaS platforms and organizations “embed the power and use of spreadsheets in less than 100 lines of code” without relying on any Excel components or third-party applications.

With excellent system integration and secondary expansion capabilities, SpreadJS is undoubtedly one of the best solutions to solve the three requirements of data sharing, scenarioization and efficiency in smart office scenarios, as well as providing customized services for enterprises beyond basic functions.

With the development of the society, the social form will also change, social needs will inevitably be adjusted. Excel, as a decades-old product, laid a good foundation for the entire data services industry. But now it’s time to think about what else we can expect from a spreadsheet tool class product.

Read more:

  • SpreadJS pure front-end table control official website
  • Why are your “development speed” and “product performance” inferior to competing products? Developer must read
  • What capabilities are needed for “table document collaboration” in the post-PANDEMIC era?