Comparison of Spreadsheet Software

Summary

In late June 2024, we did a survey of the capabilities of the spreadsheet software available. This is an overview of our findings.The ultimate goal was to determine how sophisticated each engine is. While this may be subjective, we've tried to quantify this as a combination of a few factors:Feature set supportFormula and function supportExactness of calculationsSpeed of calculationsWe are aware that we cannot be unbiased in this endavour. We are also actively trying to work against it, as we hope our learnings expose where we can improve.Comparison of featuresA spreadsheet engine feature set is perhaps the best indicator of how sophisticated it is. Features are selected based on whether they create a divergence.Comparison of function supportFunction support varies from engine to engine. We've found that 90% of the usefulness is sitting in about 350 most commonly used functions.Exactness of calculationsGenerally speaking we can say that spreadsheet applications are reliable. Given some set of inputs and functions that an engine supports, the output will be correct or acceptable to a user.However, when moving those inputs to a different engine the results may be different. So exactness really means similarity of calculations to "some standard". That standard is usually desktop Excel, but could be Sheets or some other engine. In fact, Excel has maintained several quirks and bugs from its predecessors for decades.So what really matters is how well an engine does with a model originating in another engine. The feature set as shown above is obviously a large factor but other things also matter:Correctly implemented functions. – Calculated output should be close or identical to an ideal standard, and a quirky function should maintain a "standard" quirk.Correct traversal of dependent cells. – Formulas in a spreadsheet model depend on other cells. When a change happens in one cell, it's vital that dependent cells are calculated in the right order.Excel and Excel OnlineExcel ...