Total Newbie seeking advice on spreadsheet app

As insane as this may sound, I'm trying to write a spreadsheet app. I'm retired with 40+ years of mostly C device driver, networking type development and support. The model I'm using is Apple's Numbers and I'm currently experimenting with Table trying to mimic the look and feel of Numbers' "sheet".

I believe I have two choices:

  1. I can have one Table with the first row and first column different / special and this would imply that the very first element is also special. Numbers has a circle as the top leftmost element. The top row and first column are the identifiers of the rows and columns initially starting out as A, B, C ... and 1, 2, 3 .... The advantage of this method is Table would take care that the size of the top row (the width of the columns) would match the width and position of the rest of the cells of the table. Likewise, the height of the cells in the first column would always match and align with the cells of the table. The downside with this approach is that things like sorting and selecting would need special attention.

  2. The alternative would be to have separate elements: an element in the top left corner followed by a spacer followed by a row of cells with the column identifiers A, B, C, .... Then a spacer across the entire structure. Then the there would be a column of cells for the names of the rows, a spacer, and then the actual Table of cells containing the spreadsheet itself. I am assuming that the top row with the identifiers of the columns would be a Table with one row and the first column with the identifiers of the rows would also be a Table with one column. The difficulty with this approach would be getting everything to line up correctly. I don't know if that would be hard or easy. Sometimes getting things to align is very hard, platform specific, etc. But I haven't used SwiftUI any so I don't know how hard this would be. Structurally I would prefer to take this approach. I just seems more logical and natural.

Thank you for your time

Total Newbie seeking advice on spreadsheet app
 
 
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