Spread.NET Roadmap 2021

This is an exciting year for Spread.NET! We are working on many new feature enhancements and are excited to share our plans for 2021. We are adding several new customer-requested enhancements and major new features in the upcoming releases. Here are highlights of these new features.

May 2021 Service Release

This release in early May 2021 includes new customer-requested features for tracking changes in cells. Powerful new APIs in IWorkbook enables developers to easily capture all cell changes across the entire workbook in one event handler and customize how Calculation-On-Demand operates to recalculate the cells.

We are also adding customer-requested enhancements for tracing formula references across worksheets in WinForms spreadsheets. New properties in IRange returns all dependent and precedent cells, including cross-worksheet references. Formula auditing code processes all related cells across the entire workbook and traces all dependents and precedents.

We are also adding two new calculation functions, VALUETOTEXT and ARRAYTOTEXT, which are much more useful than the TEXTJOIN for cases involving cells with a Cell Data Type object applied. For more details about this enhancement, please see this blog.

We are enhancing the lookup functions' performance optimizing calculation speed for cases with lookups in very large ranges. This enhancement improves HLOOKUP, MATCH, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, and XMATCH functions and is implemented by creating an internal cache that optimizes the searches in the target ranges during the calculation.

We are enhancing Spread Designer for WinForms to support hiding and showing sheets using the tab strip context menu just like Excel. This already works in run-time, however, the Spread Designer did not include these items because hidden sheets were always displayed as visible for design purposes. Now you can use the Spread Designer to hide and show worksheets as in Excel.

We are enhancing Pie charts to support formatting the value as a percentage like Excel. Previously, the only way to do this was by using a special calculated range of percentages as the values to use in the chart. With this enhancement, now use your raw data to create the Pie chart and calculate the percentages to show in the data label for each slice like Excel.

August 2021 Service Release

This release in early August 2021 will focus on customer-reported issues and feature enhancements that can be implemented before v15 release and improve design-time support for the .NET 5 controls. The issues and enhancements will come from feedback, so please share questions and issues with the team here.

November 2021 V15 Release

The next major release in early November 2021 features many big enhancements. Here are some highlights of what is coming:

• The new LAMBDA Function enables users to create custom functions using formulas in custom names called from other formulas. This powerful new feature allows the import and export of workbooks containing LAMDA formulas, which are then easily copied and reused across workbooks.

• The new Table Binding Enhancement enables developers to create a table in the worksheet easily and bind the content to a DataTable, DataView, or other .NET data source.

• Many new Visual Functions which use cell formulas to specify the sparkline arguments and render the sparkline in the cell will be added to support the Enhanced Sparkline types of SpreadJS, including:

  • Area: Create an Area Chart inside the cell with optional marker lines and different colors for positive and negative values.
  • Pie: Create a Pie Chart inside the cell with slices showing the relative percentage of each slice's value of the total of all values.
  • Scatter: Create a Scatter Chart inside the cell. This helps to spot trends and outliers.
  • Bullet: Create a Bullet Chart inside the cell. This is particularly great for financial and KPI measures.
  • Spread: Create a Spread Chart inside the cell. This shows the relative spread of a set of values in various styles with an optional average indicator.
  • Stacked: Create a Stacked Bar Chart or Stacked Column Chart inside the cell, with up to 4 optional target indicator lines. This is particularly great for sales analysis from various product lines, regions, salespersons, etc.
  • Hbar: Create a Horizontal Bar inside the cell to represent a positive or negative percentage value.
  • Vbar: Create Vertical Bar inside the cell to represent a positive or negative percentage value.
  • BoxPlot: Create a Box Plot Chart inside the cell to show a distribution of data based using a variety of common Box Plot Classes including 5ns, 7ns, tukey, bowley, sigma3. This extremely powerful beast of a sparkline has a steeper learning curve but is particularly great for KPI measures.
  • Vari: Create a Vari Chart inside the cell to show the variance of a value relative to a specified baseline value with optional mark line, ticks, and legend text. This is useful for showing a thermometer-like indicator with custom colors, tick spacing, and an optional marker line for a target value.
  • Cascade: Create a Cascade Chart inside the cells to show a cascade bar chart of changes in net value over time. This powerful tool is very useful for analyzing yearly sales, total profit, net tax, and much more.
  • Pareto: Create a Pareto Chart inside the cells to show a cascade bar chart showing the Pareto trend of an ordered set of values as a percentage of the total with the bars showing each value's relative area optional target indicator lines.
  • Month Calendar: Create a Month Calendar inside the cell showing a specified month in a 6x7 grid of squares. The weeks are shown in columns left to right, and the days of the week are shown in rows top to bottom, starting with Sunday. The data range specifies dates and associated values, and each day shows a color to indicate empty or 0 values, minimum, average, and maximum values.
  • Year Calendar: Create a Year Calendar inside the cell showing a specified year in a 54x7 grid of squares. This operates like Month Sparkline and shows the entire year with similar indicators and partition lines drawn between the months.
  • Gauge: The Gauge Sparkline, new in v15 for SpreadJS and Spread.NET, will provide versatile horizontal, vertical, and radial gauges for showing KPIs, financials, and other useful measures.
  • Histogram: The Histogram Sparkline, also new in v15 for SpreadJS and Spread.NET, will provide a useful analysis tool for both discrete and continuous distributions showing the total values in a specified set of ranges.

• Design-time support for .NET 5 will be completed.

• Protect Sheet Options and new ribbon button UI in Spread Designer will enable the user to set sheet protection options and password.

• Enhanced Chart Label Format will support chart labels' new options, such as showing negative numbers in red along the axis or in data labels.

• Enhanced Border Rendering will support drawing cell borders and gridlines as in Excel using the BorderCollapse property. This will make imported XLSX with complex merged cells, and cell borders look exactly as in Excel.

Stay tuned to our next GrapeCity Spread.NET releases through 2021! We are truly excited to bring these new features and improvements to the community and hope you're excited about using these new items in 2021 and beyond!

If you have any questions or need clarification, please use the comments section available below. You can also contact us by submitting your questions on the GC Documents Formus, or if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.