Great question. I think Jexcel is a great effort. There's also Handsontable. I think Jexcel and Handsontable are pretty similar: they have a lot of features, but also a lot of the same errors: performance suffers and sometimes the DOM or CSS gets messed up after a user drag operation.
I wanted to tackle the performance & reliability issues mainly. My thinking is that most users won't probably need formulas, merged cells, HTML markup. DGXL really shines for larger data sets. Excellent for numeric data input specifically.
Also, I think it implements Excel/G. Sheets controls a little better: when your users are Excel-experts, but keyboard controls work just a little different then they're used to, that's quite annoying. My goal is to stick as best as I can to the original controls.
I wanted to tackle the performance & reliability issues mainly. My thinking is that most users won't probably need formulas, merged cells, HTML markup. DGXL really shines for larger data sets. Excellent for numeric data input specifically.
Also, I think it implements Excel/G. Sheets controls a little better: when your users are Excel-experts, but keyboard controls work just a little different then they're used to, that's quite annoying. My goal is to stick as best as I can to the original controls.