Spreadsheets Will Never Die, But They Will Be Reborn

     Rumors of the spreadsheet's death have been greatly exaggerated. For forty years, people have been speculating on the demise of spreadsheets, claiming that advances in technology would render them obsolete. But, they are still going strong, and in fact, they have stood the test of time because they strike a great balance of power and usability that scrappy teams love. Spreadsheets deliver a blend of simplicity with power, offering a 'coding lite' gateway for users to creatively manipulate data within a structured environment. This makes them indispensable in data analysis, problem-solving, and operations.
‍
But spreadsheets are a victim of their success. They are so useful that people continue to want to bend them far outside their intended range. They are pushing them with larger and larger data sets, complex workflows that introduce data quality errors, collaborative workflows that risk data leaks, and more. This is what we call "feature pressure" – spreadsheets have formed such an incredible foundation of usability and power, that people want to build on top of it in a thousand different directions.

What if there were a way to relieve all that pressure? Enter SheetRocks, a platform for building spreadsheet-backed apps. We think it should be possible to keep the advantages of a spreadsheet interface, while also being able to get work done for your team and customers in exactly the way you need. So we reimagined the spreadsheet as a multi-interface system: non-technical users can interact with application data through a collaborative web interface for analysis, auditing, and administration, while developers can build robust apps off the same data using an expressive API.

Our customers love this approach because yes, they really can have it all. They can have a small app quickly that fits their business like a glove (and yes, AI makes this 10x cheaper to build!), but they can stay in control of their data and processes since it's all backed by a simple spreadsheet. It's a new way for scrappy teams to get work done in the way that makes sense to them, rather than working through a labyrinth of different tools that don't work right or embarking on an expensive and risky custom development process.
‍

We think our take on the evolution of the spreadsheet programming paradigm is really true to its nature – spreadsheets have always aspired to strike a practical middle ground between power and usability, in a way that serves as a playground for technical creativity, and SheetRocks delivers on this vision for a new generation of builders.

Spreadsheets are not dead – they have a central place in our culture and work. But it's time for them to be reborn as a platform that can expand to meet the needs of modern businesses and serve as their central operating system.