I think this would be one of those you have to make it 5-10x better than the old product. Someone who spent ins and outs of learning Excel aren't going to move to anything new unless it is FAR better than Excel.

Is anyone seriously working on an Excel competitor, and not just clone? Serious question.

The problem is that every Excel user is an Excel native. Your product would have to be magnitudes better than Excel to compensate for the cost of forcing everyone to give up their fluency in the software.

It can be better. I am no mac user but from what I have seen, Apple's excel competitor has this concept that instead of an excel tab being a single grid, it is a canvas on which you can add tables, charts, etc. As a fairly advanced excel user, this makes so much more sense than Excel's approach.

VBA is kind of a wart in Office, hasn't been updated since 1998. They made an attempt of integrating a mini visual studio in Office with C#/VB.net (VSTA), then killed it.

I see many no code alternative poping up (Microsoft power suite, alteryx, etc). But all have a pretty steep learning curve, and frankly the people who are willing to invest the time to learn them migh as well pick up SQL or even python for the same effort.

"Numbers" is an abysmal product.

I don't really use it, would be curious to know why?

It's not even close to being complete. Best described as "My First Spreadsheet". Excel (even libreoffice) are better by factors of 10.

Easy way to get some serious premiums from MSFT buying your company if you ever tried to build a viable competitor. That said though you would watch your product get deep sixed if you sold

The entire low-code/no-code markets are Excel competitors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICT no-code is just vaporware, while Excel is being used right now practically everywhere.

There are plenty of no-code tools around. People use them every day.

You will probably not like them, but that doesn't make them vaporware.

I admit my ignorance. Care to share the name of the most popular ones?