Frankly that statement puts the whole company into poor light; if you are building an Excel competitor, you better know Excel pretty well. If your chief frustration is battleship coordinates then that does not exactly evoke the feeling Excel expertise, or that they have done sufficient market research. Or maybe they are not really targeting Excel as hard as the article posits?
I think the problem is that almost everyone uses excel for different things, and that lots of people feel like they know excel when they barely scratched the surface. But the reality is that 80% of excel users probably only need basic table formatting and basic formulas.
To some, excel is a data analysis tool. For those, all excel should have is big tables where every column should have a name and you would only ever do simple operations between them. To them, things like pivot functionalities, or connecting to database is critical. Data visualisation too.
To others, excel is a way to format a table, display a planning, a work flow.
To others it is a calculation scratch pad.
To others it is merely a UI, calling powerful custom XLL or calling server APIs that will do some complex pricing, book or retrieve trades from systems and whatever.
To others it is a full feature model builder, they will run some complex business plans, with all sorts of ratios and calculations that are unique to this use case and can't be generalised by an IT dept.
To others it is a custom app, with forms, lots of VBA code, etc.
For most people it is the "xml" (as in common standard format) for users to exchange data that they can open, inspect and reason without requiring a degree in computer science.
etc
So on one side there is nothing that annoys me more that someone pretending that all an Excel user ever needs is this particular feature and that he will replace Excel with that little website.
On the other side it is true that for parts of the Excel user base, all they will ever need is one particular feature and one could take a bite at Excel's market share.
Point being that if he actually knew Excel then he'd also know that Excel supports named columns just fine. With statement like that, he presents himself as ignorant of the basic features of their main competitor, which is not exactly great way to win the power-users of mentioned competitor.
I'd be inclined to attribute that to messaging more than understanding. I hear what you're saying, but a fully qualified statement that captures all of the details both loses a lot of impact and isn't the kind of thing that would appear in the Verge.
Exactly. It's the same problem as communication of science to the general public: if you make it 100% accurate, most people either won't understand or won't care. After enough customer interviews you start to get a sense of what gets people nodding their heads, and that's what makes it into these articles. Assuming that statements like this reflect a company's complete understanding of the problem just isn't fair.
I don't think it's a question of whether it supports it or not, it's that Coda does it by default and has built the rest of the tool around that feature.
