In the digital age, pure front-end table controls may become a solution for collaborative office

There is no doubt that the development process of human society has entered the digital age, and digital transformation has become the focus of attention in all walks of life. According to the "Future Enterprise Efficiency White Paper" released by IDC, by 2022, more than 60% of global GDP will be digital, and the growth of each industry will be driven by digitally enhanced products, operations and relationships. The operation mode and business model of the digital economy will surely bring changes to the working methods that have been formed since the traditional industrial society.

What is certain is that the digital economy requires a more efficient and flexible way of working, and collaborative office will become the norm for many companies. From meeting reservations to purchasing and warehousing, from sales reports to survey statistics...Many scenarios including daily office, asset management and business management need to be digitalized and intelligent with the help of technology, which undoubtedly requires a lot of development work .

Collaborative office, the "blind spot" of EXCEL's office

In the era of big data, data is very important to enterprises in any industry, and data assets have become one of the most important assets of enterprises in the digital age. However, as long as you do data processing, data analysis, data pivoting, etc., you will inevitably have exposure to electronic forms. Among them, EXCEL has the highest market share and popularity, and is an indispensable office "assistant" for enterprises.

Although EXCEL is powerful, it has brought great convenience to personal office and corporate office in the industrial age. But in the digital age of mobile internet, it has a fatal flaw: that is, when it comes to authority management, workflow, and collaborative office, it enters the office blind zone of EXCEL.

When enterprises have higher and higher requirements for informatization, stand-alone office software represented by EXCEL becomes more and more difficult to adapt to future development. It is even more difficult for sharing interaction, workflow, collaborative office, and user authority control. It has become one of the pain points that plague the majority of enterprises and developers.

More data requirements + long development cycle, so the workload of developers soars

In addition to the difficulty of achieving collaborative office, facing the demand for form development, the current solution for most small and medium-sized companies is: store business data in a database, and when data is needed, IT personnel will fetch the data through SQL statements, and then export the Excel table Give it to the business staff, and then the business staff will process the data in Excel.

But there are many problems in this workflow:

First, the timeliness of data cannot be guaranteed. The data in Excel is stored in the computers of various business personnel. Whether it is summarized in the current month or in the same day, there is a certain time difference, and it is impossible to update online in real time.

Second, there is repetitive work. A large headquarters-type enterprise usually has many subordinate departments, and many forms of branches are the same. However, due to the use of Excel for individual statistics and summary data, a large amount of repetitive work has been generated and the efficiency is low.

In addition, there is the issue of role permissions. Excel provides limited security. It can only provide permissions to restrict user access and modification, but it cannot manage user roles, nor can it perform level access restrictions on data, and enterprise data security cannot be guaranteed.

Faced with this lengthy work flow and a large number of forms development needs, if you develop applications in the traditional way, every step must be implemented by writing code, and you have to face long development cycles, untimely business responses, and low efficiency. And other issues, and later maintenance also requires professional developers to be responsible, further increasing the workload of developers.

From the digital office of employees to the digital transformation of enterprises, what kind of tools can meet the needs of form developers for high development efficiency + easy operation and maintenance, and help users understand business data in an intuitive and concise way? A pure front-end table control with both openness and scalability may provide a solution.

EXCEL-like pure front-end table controls may become the "just need" of developers

Like front-end development, in the digital age, form development also faces high-frequency and changeable demands. How to complete these requirements efficiently and with high quality is one of the focuses of developers, and control products may be a good choice.

Because the control is an encapsulation of data and methods. This type of tool encapsulates a large number of basic functions, supports reuse, and can interact with other objects. It is a weapon that reduces repetitive work and improves development efficiency, and can facilitate project development and software delivery. This is fully reflected in SpreadJS.

SpreadJS uses a sparse array as a storage structure, and uses HTML5 Canvas to draw an interactive interface. It has built-in 32 types of charts, 18 types of mini-charts and 182 types of shapes. It provides rich data visualization methods and efficient calculation engines, and is optimized for data processing performance. , To meet the needs of various types of data calculation, visualization, data perspective analysis, etc., and to maximize storage space savings. It is possible for business personnel to obtain and understand data intuitively and concisely.

In addition to outstanding performance on the visual side, SpreadJS's calculation engine also supports more than 450 Excel formula functions, including custom functions, array functions, dynamic arrays, asynchronous functions, XMATCH, LET, XLOOKUP functions, etc., developers can customize and cross-table Multi-scene computing requirements such as quoting and asynchronous calling are used to realize data aggregation and continuously improve effective data.

As for the other major pain point of developers, "collaborative editing", the pure front-end table control also has good performance. SpreadJS provides cell-level operation granularity. Through the developer’s secondary development, Excel documents can be parsed at the front end, enabling multi-person collaboration, collaborative editing, data synchronization, version management, and historical query online documents. This greatly increases the frequency of data updates and bids farewell to inefficiency and tediousness. The stand-alone era.

Different companies and different developers are used to different applications. In order to achieve the two "KPIs" of efficient development and easy operation and maintenance, compatibility and scalability are another key indicators that developers must consider.

As a pure front-end control, SpreadJS supports embedding various applications in a native way, without the need of back-end code and third-party components, that can be combined with various back-end technical frameworks to achieve cross-platform development. Its spreadsheet editor also provides a "similar" Excel function, with built-in APIs for online reporting, printing and submitting, real-time preview and data verification; developers can design report templates, edit, calculate, analyze data online/offline, and connect to the database. Bind, load and modify various Excel documents, and save the modified data to the database.

In addition, this pure front-end control has built-in 18 conditional formats, 32 charts, 53 cell formats and 182 shapes. It is compatible with Excel data formats and can embed Excel functions into the Web system, providing a highly Excel-like experience. Through secondary development, SpreadJS can be embedded in the enterprise report SaaS platform, and the original Excel report template of the business system can be reused. Excel, CSV, JSON and other files can be imported and exported, PDF exported, printed and previewed directly in the browser. Reduce the workload of data migration from local to online.

In summary, this HTML5-based pure front-end table control has the characteristics of "high performance, cross-platform, and high compatibility with Excel", which is exactly what table developers need for "efficient development, easy operation and maintenance, and multi-person collaboration. The demand of "is highly "adapted".

Concluding remarks

It is not difficult to see that the pure front-end table control represented by SpreadJS improves efficiency and liberates capabilities significantly, and its essence is to improve quality and efficiency. On the one hand, it is to improve the efficiency of developers. While reducing enterprise R&D costs and project delivery risks, it also reduces the workload of developers and improves work efficiency. On the other hand, it is to improve the efficiency of users. Using highly visible and excel-like table controls, it is possible for multiple people to collaborate online for data maintenance and analysis, which greatly reduces the difficulty of subsequent maintenance. In this digital age where efficiency is paramount, improving development efficiency is still the top priority. From this perspective, pure front-end development control is a good choice.

Perhaps when using front-end controls such as SpreadJS, fewer developers are needed, but the requirements for developers are even higher. Not only must have a good understanding of the business, but also a very thorough understanding of data and development, and finally connect the entire process from demand to development.