Hi all,

For many years ago, during the 80's, there was another spreadsheet that was the #1, Lotus 1-2-3, and in the early 90's Excel started to take market shares and finally become the #1 in the mid 90's.

When the first releases of Excel hit the market many laughed about it and made the same comments similar to some of them in this thread.

Keep in mind that Excel now have been on the market for more then 20 years while other spreadsheets have been around for some few years only.

So what we see is only that the history repeat itself.

At present the only real challenger to Excel is GNumeric and it's only available for the Linux-platform. Challenger in terms of the built-in functions it offer and propably only within the public research-sector and to some extend the public school-sector.

For commercial business there exist no alternatives to MS Office and it will take a very long time before this situation will be changing.

Competition is always good because it means that the vendors need to be on top and set the customers in focus.

So in general I always encourage competition no matter what it is about.

Kind regards,
Dennis