Comment by digdugdirk
2 years ago
I see this software has tables - are these able to be used like excel sheets?
I see this as a necessity for software like this. It's the one feature that Notion has that the competition doesn't seem to have, and it's absolutely crucial to everyday work for so many people. It seems to be a blind spot for programmer-types, I'm guessing because they see Excel as limited?
I don't think Notion has formulas for tables. I think you mean formulas for databases.
The formulas for databases like Notion has is actually the second-most requested feature right now and is tagged as Acknowledged, so hopefully we will get it soon.
Coda has the most powerful tables I've seen of the Notion alternatives, and was a fair bit cheaper for my team since they don't charge per viewer or editor but per "creator". But unfortunately it's not open-source or local.
They have a pretty good [writeup](https://coda.io/blog/productivity/tables-not-spreadsheets) on why "spreadsheets" were avoided in favor of more traditional "tables" (a la RDBMS).
(co-founder anytype here) tables are simple now, no formulas. Plan to add formulas to data-bases (what I think you mean by notion having it) - it's one of the top requested features on our forum
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