What's New in SpreadJS v14.1

Pivot Tables

Pivot tables are among the most useful Excel features–allowing users to swiftly summarize and analyze large quantities of data with a simple and intuitive UI. The SpreadJS v14.1 release includes this feature, PivotPanel UI, and Excel import/export capabilities.

There are numerous business applications and use cases for pivot tables, including report layouts, auditing, marketing, and sales.

This add-on supports various pivot table functions like sorting, filtering, and grouping. For a more in-depth look at SpreadJS Pivot Tables, see "How to Use PivotTables with SpreadJS". To explore possible use cases, check out Create Beautiful Reports with Custom PivotTables and JavaScript Spreadsheets.

Camera Shape

Camera shape is a new feature that lets you create a dynamic snapshot of a specified range of cells–making it ideal for creating stunning dashboards. This shape will reflect all of the live changes made in the actual cell range.

It works like a normal shape and includes Excel import/export, grouping/ungrouping, copying/pasting, and cross-sheet support. This benefits observing changes in a spreadsheet, even when those changes aren't currently displayed, such as showing a dashboard or report with data in other sheets.

Chart Enhancements

We also added some functional enhancements to charts, as well as two new sparkline types!

Word-Wrap for Bar Y-axis Values

This feature automatically word-wraps values in the Y-axis of a bar chart that are too long to fit in the designated area.

IMAGE Sparkline

This new function allows you to specifically assign a URL to an image file, which will is then displayed in a cell. In addition to the URL, you can also specify a scale or clip a specific image section.

Axis Reverse Values

To support Excel parity, chart axes can now have their values set in reverse. This can help you meet certain requirements display data to better match the data type.

Histogram Sparkline

This new sparkline type allows you to visually interpret numerical data separated into different bins and is implemented using both continuous and discrete histograms.

Gauge KPI Sparkline

This new sparkline is perfect for adding informative gauges to your dashboards with simple functions.

Calculation Enhancements

WebService Function

The WebService function is a calculation enhancement that returns data from any web service. This is written as the following formula:

=WEBSERVICE(url)

Here, "URL" is the URL of the web service that will be called. You can import and export this function to and from Excel. One of the most common use cases for this function is to keep XML-based data from a website consistently updated within your spreadsheets.

LET Function Upgrade

We enhanced the LET function to make it consistent with Excel's updated implementation–meaning that "." characters are no longer allowed in the name of the function. In addition, localization is removed from the LET function to mimic Excel's behavior.

Shape Enhancements

Hyperlinks

Shapes, group shapes, and connector shapes now support hyperlinks, including support for fromJSON and toJSON. Clicking on the shape will open up a link in the current web browser. Then it's as simple as setting the "hyperlink" property on the shape.

Compound Line Types

We added this Excel feature to SpreadJS to enable users to set compound line types for shapes, including simple, double, thick/thin, thin/thick, and triple.

Snap-to-Grid

This Excel behavior allows shapes to snap to a grid in the spreadsheet, in addition to aligning to the left, top, right, etc. It's now easier to align shapes with other elements in the workbook.

Gradient Fill

This feature matches Excel's implementation of filling in shapes with gradient colors. The gradient can travel in linear or radial directions and is set in the fill style using the GradientFillType.

Texture Fill

This shape feature allows you to add textures or pictures in shapes and change the offset and scaling to show patterns of images.

Text Edit

Double-clicking in a shape now allows the user to edit the text within the cell. Format the text with a simple behavior, such as fill color, font, transparency, text direction, and text alignment. It also supports auto-break and text wrapping.

Alignment

Shapes in SpreadJS now support both horizontal and vertical alignment in the v14.1 release. This makes it much easier to layout shapes within your workbook.

Distribute

Distributing shapes allocates the spacing between selected shapes evenly so that those shapes are spaced correctly and with proper alignment. This feature supports both horizontal and vertical space distribution.

Workbook Enhancements

Of the numerous features added in SpreadJS v14.1, several were customer-requested. These enhancements were made to the main spreadsheet functionality:

Trailing Row Position

We enhanced the frozen trailing row implementation to control the placement of the rows. Now you can display rows right after the data, rather than having a space between the data and the trailing rows.

Public API for Undo/Redo Stack

We also exposed the API for the Undo/Redo stack so users have more control over the undo/redo operations in the workbook to manage memory consumption.

Sheet Tab Position

This new feature allows developers to choose where tabs in the workbook are displayed. By default, they are displayed at the bottom of the Spread instance, but can now move to the top to better fit your application's design.

Restrict Pasting to Invisible Cells/Rows/Columns

By default, you can paste data to invisible cells, rows, or columns in SpreadJS. With this release, we added the ability to restrict that behavior.

Date Formatting Based on Locale Settings

This feature formats dates to utilize the browser's locale instead of a pre-specified date format.

Customize Checkbox and Radio Button Size

Users can adjust the size of checkboxes and radio buttons to fit whatever design choices exist in the application.

Cell Button Hover Style

Customize the style of cell buttons when the cursor is hovering over them.

Undo Selection Movement

This feature enhances the undo functionality so that when an action is undone, the previously selected cell will be re-selected.

Disable Group Collapse/Expand when Protected

This Excel parity feature increases the protection options that prevent groups from collapsing or expanding when the sheet is protected.

Disable Save Warning Messages

When you create a new file in the SpreadJS Designer and have unsaved changes, a warning message typically appears to remind you. With v14.1, you can now optionally disable this message.

TableSheet (BETA)

TableSheet, now in beta, is a fast, data-bound table view with a spreadsheet functionality and an advanced relational data manager. It supports column formulas, styles, conditional formatting, sorting, and filtering. You can check out a demo of this beta feature in our demo explorer here.

We hope are you are excited about the new features and enhancements added to SpreadJS in the v14.1 release. To try these features, download a free 30-day trial of SpreadJS.

Check out our demos and documentation to learn more.