If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.
Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...
Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.
Any nontrivial excel sheet should be a database backed application, the finance guys who build them are in every sense programmers they're just using the wrong tool by convention.
I agree with you, BTW, but I've never seen moving Excel sheets to an application work in practice. You can do it, and it just creates more Excel sheets.
* Redo UI patterns (for old users): Only matter for on-boarding and compatibility, and probably need to redo the anti-patterns, not necessarily a good idea, or at least must be hold before the next:
* Define a much better internal model than excel has (I bet a mixture of relational, array model as core, then a reactive layer on top), including proper support for correct datatypes (not localized!), dates in all shapes, currency, commodities, unit of measure, etc, tables default as fixed type per column instead of free-form, then we have proper "variant" values, use algebraic types, and so on...
* Then redo the UI
* Define how import/export correctly (so not more non-sense about import based on localized dates, currencies...)
* ... and from legacy formats like Excel
P.D: I explore the idea on https://tablam.org and my goal is eventually marry what excel+access do in one app
So long as you don't have things which aren't dates but which Excel insists totally are. (Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2429759-involuntary-celibacy...)
But yes, cans of worms are many, and Tardis-like they are larger inside than out.
Let the dinosaurs go extinct!
Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.
Just throw the raw data at the LLM and tell it to do the analysis directly on that, and there's a good chance it will use python and some data science libraries for you.
And if you want, it'll turn it into a web page where people can drag and drop more raw data files on to get updated analytics.
The real grip comes from entire business processes implemented across dozens of worksheets with incredibly complicated cross linked formulae relying on Excel edge case behavior. As soon as LibreOffice et al display the most minute differences they're done and will never be mentioned again.
If you're just doing lists with maybe some simple calcs (which is what most people use spreadsheets for most of the time), pretty much anything works.
The vast majority of people I have seen using Excel don't know how to write a formula. Now they just started copy-pasting whatever ChatGPT was telling them to copy-paste, but well... and anyway all the alternatives do support formulas of course.
Why would they give a shit about the little comfort of the employees who don't want to learn new shortcuts?
Otherwise calc has everything for most people. Macros work different a little.
I've been finding myself using Google Sheets more, which has the potential for the same problems in this article.
The computation side is trivial in comparison. But with AI, emulating the UI becomes far easier.
Big business kind of wants 24/4 support that those will not be providing at all though? Plus the various nonsense certifications. I mean try to convince anyone in corporate to use Libre and they'll probably just laugh.
(not that they would ever use that support, they just want to have someone to scapegoat lol)
Row Zero's fully Excel compatible, including keyboard shortcuts, long-tail pivot table configurability, 500+ built-in formulas like LAMBDA and LET, and real-time collab. But it scales 1000x beyond Excel (2 billion row limit vs 1 million for Excel), has built in connectors to everything (Databricks, Postgres, S3, Snowflake, etc), native Python support, deep AI integration with Databricks Genie, and all the security and data governance features to make big banks and healthcare providers comfortable. It's built by the team who brought Rust into AWS and rewrote S3's file system circa 2018.
We're used by individuals and small businesses all the way up to huge deployments in the Fortune 100.
Source: Was founder and CEO, now leading spreadsheet development at Databricks
But is it 1-2-3 compatible?
Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.
Also Excel is probably the best thing MS produces. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere
Unfortunately I have to.
I can tell you all of the Excel alternatives are extremely disappointing.
And the 3k commits in a month, all good signs
/s