Folks, I'm wondering how people in here might tackle a technical problem we're about to encounter. People here often come up with surprising lateral-thinking ideas.
We'll soon start on an app rewrite so it runs on all brands of tablet sized devices. We've been evaluating many development tools and languages and so far it looks like Xamarin is in the lead. Our technical challenge is to create Excel like behaviour in the app in the most realistic way possible. We want to load an XLSX file, display formatted cells and charts, updating cells and saving the changed document is a nice-to-have. There are no cross-platform native controls that mimic Excel, but there are web/JS products like Google Sheets <https://developers.google.com/google-apps/spreadsheets/?hl=en> and GrapeCity's SpreadJS <https://spread.grapecity.com/Products/SpreadJS/> which look like great candidates. They are of course HTML5 based, so they would have to be embedded in the apps in browser controls. I'm not normally that keen on "hybrid" apps that borrow web rendering, but I've used Google Charts in a phone app and the result was acceptable. Any ideas or comments on this problem of getting Excel behaviour in native apps would be most welcome. Thanks *Greg K*
