I found the next generation of Excel

I stumbled upon a SaaS app called Equals, which is a browser-based spreadsheet. My first thought as a data analyst was that this was pretty slick. My second thought as a head of a business intelligence team was that it's too bad it's not Excel.

In an earlier post, I was talking about how users don't need special software to create another line chart. They want to see the data first. Excel is the go-to natural tool for users to do that. The problem Excel has is that it doesn't scale to large datasets or easily manage distribution and governance. Equals looks like the kind of tool that solves those problems. I am not a customer and I have not even tried the app. These comments are just based on what I gleaned from their website. (Microsoft you should be taking notes! 👇🏻)

BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS END UP BACK IN A SPREADSHEET

That's their copy headline talking about their spreadsheet, and it resonates with me because it is absolutely true. Doesn't matter what BI tool you have or how many ways it lets you visualize your data. At the end of the day, the most used feature of a BI tool is the "Export to Excel" button.

You can just copy/paste data in like you would normally with any spreadsheet, but that's inefficient. I use SQL on a daily basis. There are ways to import data to Excel via an embedded query, but it takes a number of steps to set up and you typically have to use something like DBeaver to write the query first. Equals gives you a real SQL editor that flies out from the side when you need it.

Don't know SQL or don't want to use it? Use the query builder instead.

You can overwrite individual cells and add notes alongside the data, and they persist even after data refreshes! (What is this dark magic?!)

You can schedule your queries to refresh automatically and be notified when they complete.

You're not limited to SQL queries either. Equals has built-in connectors to several popular SaaS apps like Salesforce, Stripe, Facebook Ads, etc. (They use Fivetran behind the scenes.) You can even write your own custom Python or JavaScript script and import directly from that! 🤯

Oh, and you can still create those dashboards, and send them out on Slack or email.

Equals also introduces some quality-of-life enhancements like a practical formula editor for those longer more complex formulas.

And auto-expand which saves you the manual effort of adding that new column each month.

It also has pivot tables, AI assist, and supports live collaboration. You can create Saved Queries that are shared between files. Go back to prior query versions. Use Excel-like formulas. (The only thing I couldn't determine from their site is what the row limit is on their spreadsheets.) It all sounds so perfect.

But it won't work.

For all the advantages it demonstrates, Equal's one Achilles heel is that it is not Excel. It may look like Excel, but it's not. I appreciate that Equals is upfront about their pricing, but I can say that the price is going to be difficult to justify when everyone already gets Excel bundled with their Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. It's not like you are going to save costs on Excel; you're going to be paying for both.

This monopoly and market share is why Microsoft is the only company that is in a position to put all the competition out of business. If Microsoft were to add these kinds of features to Excel, every other BI dashboard or visualization tool would dry up overnight.