Handsontable 9.0.0: new formula plugin

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Style Pass

2021-08-17 19:30:05

The new formula plugin is now out! It integrates our powerful calculation engine – HyperFormula® – under the hood, which gives you more features, better performance, and compatibility with Excel and Sheets.

Up to version 8.4.0 there was a formula plugin that was built by us based on two other projects: our own formula parser , and an external library of spreadsheet functions, called formula.js . The problem with this solution was that we couldn’t easily extend or improve it. We also ran into some performance issues which required a completely different approach in the way we parse formulas and build AST, as well as calculate and recalculate input data.

In 2018 we started working on a new formula engine. We named it HyperFormula and, once it was ready, published it on GitHub under an open-source license. At that point, we started to incorporate it into Handsontable, which was our ultimate goal from the very beginning.