Looks like a great start! First thing that comes to mind - let arrow keys move the focus to the adjacent cells. Without this it is a huge usability loss.
Interesting, it looks like it's based of ethercalc which is also a great project. We were trying to go in a different direction though and be a little bit more user friendly and also work on mobile.
I gave it a quick spin and it seems like it needs more work to behave like a spreadsheet.
Even simple circular references are not detected right now. For example, I put some numbers from A1 through A5 and then put a SUM(A1:A6) into A6. It added everything up (including the sum itself) and keeps updating A6 with the sum of A1:A5 every time I move from one cell to another using Enter or Tab. You can see this at https://ethersheet.org/s/IsThisAwesomeNow
And also, as @binarymax stated, arrow keys to navigate (along with F2 to edit a cell instead of the default of putting a cell in edit mode), usage of arrow keys within formulas to get cell references (instead of typing the cell reference), easy ways to format cells, easy way to extend the width or height of columns/rows...I presume there's a large backlog of features to implement. :)
Right now, this is far behind EtherCalc in terms of features and usability.
I was looking for a spreadsheet which I could use to implement custom formulas that would interact with a client-side app, and embed the sheets in the app also, so I started building this: https://github.com/fiatjaf/react-microspreadsheet
It has a lot of features (try the edge cases if you feel like and report your experience to me, please), but it also has some bugs with, for example, the click-at-a-cell-to-add-it-as-input-to-the-currently-being-edited-cell. I'm seeking to make this work.
There are some bugs with the formula parsing too, but they are easy to solve, I'm just being lazy. I was using a very nasty raw regex parsing, but I switched to a Jison implementation that is more reliable, I guess. I've never done this before, though.
Small business wants to automate. At the moment they use spreadsheets, email and web forms to interact with customers, but want these to work together. I have seen 20 requests a week, on a single forum, for small bits of code. Code to do very simple automation tasks. I am making it so they can automate with only basic spreadsheet skills.
Happy to chat with you eddyparkinson after the at add gmail dot com
The undo functionality is actually almost there, I think we just don't have an interface for it. The arrow keys thing should be easy to implement. I will add it to github, and of course accept a pull request! We definitely need to accept ranges for formulas or some up with some easy way to do that.
The project as a whole is definitely unfinished but we have been working on it for so long and lost some motivation. I wanted to just get it out there to at least re-motivate myself to work on it.
Please note, I don't think all the features I listed are desirable. (Pie menus for dragging gestures? Pretty hokey.)
Ethersheet allows typing ranges in formulas and that is possibly enough. Dragging to choose a range can be nice but it has to be implemented carefully. When to stop acquiring cells for the range and return focus to the formula editor? Some versions of Excel do this badly. For example, after dragging to enter a range you use arrow keys to balance parens. Excel thinks you are still selecting cells and inserts multiple ranges into your formula.
Dragging the selected region works only for the last selected cell, not for all your selection. If you put 1 2 3 , select them all together and drag it becomes 1 1 1 1 1 not 1 2 3 4 5
I love spreadsheets. So much so that I even mentioned Excel in dating profiles. But Excel is expensive, OpenOffice slow and buggy, and Google is... well, Google. Ethersheet is a fast, effective, and reliable alternative to get your spreadsheeting done. I love spreadsheets and so I love Ethersheet. If you're like me, you will, too.
FYI you can rent Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, OneNote, Access and publisher for three beers a month at London prices. That's pretty cheap and it works online and offline.
