IronCalc got funding from the NLnet NGI0 Core Fund
IronCalc is a spreadsheet engine and ecosystem. That is:
MIT/Apache 2.0 licensed. You can use it in anyway you want
Feature rich. You shouldn’t worry that this or that function is not supported.
Excel compatible. We at IronCalc are in awe of the software created by Microsoft over the years. We want every one to be able to use their spreadsheets.
Fully tested. Modern programming practices should be used covering with tests any feature of the system
Fast and lightweight. The programs shouldn’t be heavier than a few hundred kilobytes.
International from day one. Language should no be a barrier to use a spreadsheet.
Well designed. It should be nice and friendly to use. Designed with love from the ground up
Although spreadsheets have been around for over 40 years now and there are quite a few proprietary and open source projects around it is still difficult to find a readily available engine that any user can use for any purpose. Some are expensive, some need accounts, many are flimsy and buggy.
Many use cases are not covered by the whole industry:
A company wants to create a SaaS application that is based on Spreadsheets. There are currently hundreds of companies, if not thousands, that have a half baked spreadsheet in their systems that would instantly benefit from high quality open source project like IronCalc
A user wants to open an spreadsheet programmatically, put some values and get the answers, for one thousand cases
A citizen of the world wants to use a spreadsheet online and share it with friends about their travel experiences
Another citizen wants to embed a spreadsheet in their blog so that their user interact with it, playing with their own test cases.
Besides code the spreadsheet industry would also benefit from fundamental research, while tens of books and thousands of research papers a devoted to subjects like compilers, general algorithms or other aspects of computer science very little has been dedicated to spreadsheets and their technologies. We don’t want just to open source our code, we want to write papers on algorithms and evaluation strategies, we want to hold conferences, help PhD researchers and push the envelope further. We would like that the next person starting a spreadsheet engine will have a solid set of tools and knowledge.
We aim on having an MVP by January 15th mid 2024. Keep your eyes open for this space.
You can try it out today. Running entirely in your browser:
https://playground.ironcalc.com/
See also the base engine code at:
https://github.com/ironcalc/IronCalc
IronCalc is developed by Nicolás Hatcher with lots of help from the designer Daniel González-Albo
Send me a note at hello@ironcalc.com