Spreadsheets will be heavily used forever. Excel alone will keep Microsoft relevant in the business world. JavaScript gives us 1 numeric datatype, and there's no good way to load a gigabyte of numeric data into a web application.

"Forever" is a long time. Personally, even though there isn't a viable alternative right now, I'm optimistic there's one just around a corner.

e.g. see this Python spreadsheet (which I only just discovered myself) here http://manns.github.com/pyspread/

Python expressions in your grid cells, integrated with numpy and matplotlib, and (if you want) a 3D data grid! In any case, Excel is in many ways crufty and busy when a much more minimalist data-grid-view with powerful scripting (e.g. from Python) would probably be much better for power users.

The key word there is `power'. Most people who use spreadsheets on a daily basis -- myself included -- are not `power' users; they're just Joes with varying degrees of competency. Using Python expressions in a spreadsheet might bring insane power and flexibility to proceedings, but it's naturally going to limit itself to the small number of people who both know Python and use a spreadsheet regularly. Teaching most people how to make simple formulae in Excel is hard enough; teaching them VLOOKUPs is damn-near impossible; teaching them to use Python is, effectively, impossible.

Any viable alternative to Excel has to overcome ingrained user familiarity, inertia, and be simple enough that your average Joe can use it. It would also need to be demonstrably better than Excel, which might look like crap but has quite a lot of power under the hood. It's the only Microsoft program I'd actually consider `good'.

> Any viable alternative to Excel has to overcome ingrained user familiarity, inertia, and be simple enough that your average Joe can use it.

I agree with what you're saying if you want one program to do all these things, but I'm not sure that's the way to go. Can you imagine any other industry where the same program serves both the "average Joe" and the power user?

One program can't be all things to all people. In the same way we both have iMovie and Final Cut, I think there's room for two types of spreadsheet program. Excel trying to cater to both types of people seems like a folly; it'll never make everyone happy. Why not replace Excel with a web-app on the low end, and make something more powerful that puts scripting front-and-center for people who need it?

I disagree.

As an example, even though I'm not a designer, I use Photoshop to create assets for my software. That would the same tool that my father, an ex-lithographer, uses for DTP and digital retouching.

A counter-example to my idiot-using-rocket-scientists'-tools is my girlfriend. She's an economist at a rather large central bank, and uses Excel to model what economists model when they're defining monetary policy. Those models are huge, and many run overnight. She comes home and Excel is the thing she uses for anything even vaguely resembling a list.

There's a lot to be said for everyone using the same program for similar tasks. Most of the advanced Excel users I know, and even myself to an extent, only do what we do now because we started using Excel at a basic level and learned more of its functionality as we went, and as needed. It's much easier to start off in the swallow end of Excel then work your way up to the deep end than it is to be stuck in a separate paddling pool and then thrown into the deep water to advance beyond a certain arbitrary level.

Another benefit is that one program being used by all levels makes it easier for advanced users to help less advanced users. Can you imagine trying to help a less advanced user in their paddling pool spreadsheet when you're used to something much more powerful that probably bears only superficial resemblance to it?

This looks very interesting, thanks for the link.

While I do largely agree with you - isn't this is exactly the sort of thing that servers would be better at handling?

For the most part, even if you load 1 GB worth of numbers to do some processing with them, you'd probably only look at a summary of those numbers or some sort of aggregation. So your browser technically wouldn't have to load that information in JS, a server could do it and crunch those numbers presumably faster than a desktop would, and with a lot of these new client-app-like frameworks nowadays giving you near instant feedback, at this point we'd be arguing whether the "calculation engine" underlying the spreadsheet interface is on your local machine or on a remote machine.

What about Typed Arrays? Native Client?

It depends which `world' you're talking about. Every medium+ sized business I've come across utterly refuses to move over the a `cloud' replacement for Word, Excel, &c., mostly due to security concerns. Corporate IT departments are notoriously conservative, corporate policy-makers notoriously paranoid, so any progress toward a `cloud'-based provider will take many, many years to make significant gains.

I used it yesterday.

My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday.

I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)

"I have no use" != "world has no use", please distinguish between these two. For one, I wouldn't trust Joe Cloudfarmer with my tax return calculations, thankyouverymuch - server data compromise is a matter of when, not if (last year's Dropbox fiasco, anyone?).

I use spreadsheets practically every day, I highly doubt office desktop software is going away anytime soon.