While the "Ether" functionality is awesome, I don't like personally like SocialCalc. I was hoping for something better to be honest, as ergonomy-wise it's just years behind.
The main problem for our use case is that you can't have multiple sheets for one "document" (as far as I can tell). There are other small but important problems such as the weird formatting interface. All things combined make SocialCalc about twice as slow as LibreOffice for me so far. I still have to use it since there's nothing better at the moment, but I'm not really happy about it.
It seem to me a web app like this enables a re-think of the file and sheets organizational structure, which is really a compromise due to the limitations of a local file based application. It's simulating being able to link different spreadsheets together by putting them all in the same file.
For a web app, linking to other independent sheets should be the way to go. You'd need a convenient way to define links to other sheets (perhaps defining an alias for links to the other sheet), browse linked sheets and open them in another browser tab. Browsers already have multiple tabs, so there's no need to have a tab based structure for this inside a browser tab.
Just throwing it out there, I've not thought the consequences through really, but it seems a shame to just blindly recreate a file based metaphor.
Tracy Ruggles helped getting a better formatting UI (modeled after CKEditor at that time) for Socialtext — screenshot at https://www.socialtext.net/help-en/socialcalc_move_source_ex... — but something more touch-friendly and intuitive (post-bootstrap) would be awesome.
Please get in touch on ethercalc repo or write me if you know a UX designer interested in revamping our UI!
One of these days (or months) I'll try to take a look at it. The first things i'd like to do are:
* understand how event bubbling works (so that you can put something more complex than a html button in a html cell, maybe a select menu)
* disable dynamic rendering (where cells get reinstantiated upon each redraw)
* possibly implement both by using a specific th cell subtype
By the way I've been able to bake in extended excel formula support from the formulajs project by hacking inside the SocialCalc.CalculateFunction function.. Bit of a kludge but it's handy to support some of them more arcane xl functions.
I'm not sure if this is very helpful, but my two big issues were the lack of pages, of course, but mostly--the lack of text formatting for each cell. It makes the actual spreadsheet hard to read.
I've still going to use it because yes, it's very necessary to have a social spreadsheet platform that is open-source and that you can host on your own servers. Thanks for the work you put in.
Re UI, each cell supports basic WikiText, and clicking the "Format" tab next to the default "Edit" shows the Format:Text dropdown that one can change to "HTML" and then click the top-left "Save to: CellCoordinate". That allows arbitrary HTML in cell presentations.
Alignment, font, etc can also be adjusted in the same tab.
If you'd like to use HTML formatting for all cells by default, the third button on that tab "Show sheet settings" allows sheet-wide formatting customizations. Hope this helps!
The main problem for our use case is that you can't have multiple sheets for one "document" (as far as I can tell). There are other small but important problems such as the weird formatting interface. All things combined make SocialCalc about twice as slow as LibreOffice for me so far. I still have to use it since there's nothing better at the moment, but I'm not really happy about it.