One of the most crucial features of any enterprise web app is a spreadsheet table. Depending on the advancement of spreadsheet functionality, it can help to digitalize many business activities and assist users in decision-making.
Equipping your web app with a basic spreadsheet is relatively easy, however, such a solution is usually not enough, while building the necessary functionality from scratch requires a great investment of company’s resources. This issue can be resolved with a JavaScript spreadsheet.
Going beyond Advantages of Excel with JavaScript Spreadsheets
Excel has been one of the most popular spreadsheet software for decades used by both businesses and households. Its strengths lie in a comprehensible user interface and ease of usability allowing people without a technical background to feel confident about applying formulas for calculations and data processing. Microsoft’s product has been frequently chosen for building mock-ups, drafts and models for testing. Modern Excel also features great connectivity with numerous plugins.
Today, users can facilitate the advantages of Excel and go beyond them with JavaScript spreadsheet libraries, which are offering a great user experience, the comfort of usage and seamless data processing even in the case of working with large databases.
Where Are Standalone JavaScript Spreadsheet Libraries Used?
As has already been mentioned, a JavaScript spreadsheet can add the necessary functionality for data processing and manipulation to web applications. It is possible to embed a library into web applications developed with either JavaScript frameworks or pure JS fitting them exactly to individual needs.
This makes it a perfect solution for enterprise management apps as such a spreadsheet library can enhance builders used for business logic, forms and smart documents. Furthermore, spreadsheet libraries based on JS have proved to be useful for developing educational apps and notebooks for scientific computation.
Boosting Workflow with Handsontable
Handsontable is a great example of a JavaScript spreadsheet grid library designed primarily for supporting enterprise web apps. It combines core spreadsheet functionality such as basic manipulation of columns and rows including resizing, moving, hiding or freezing, data importing and exporting, cell merging as well as non-contiguous selection with advanced tools for multi-column sorting, working with nested headers, row trimming and customizing borders, renderers and plugins.
Handsontable supports a vast variety of predefined cell types including numeric, time, date, dropdown, checkbox, select, password, autocomplete with the tool for creating your own cell type.
To power the calculations, you can use formulas of the HyperFormula plugin offered by the Handsontable team. It now offers 389 ready-to-use functions for statistics, financial, mathematical, trigonometric and engineering calculations, text manipulations and much more.
