161–170 of 223 posts
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Excel has been able to name columns for years.
They've always done a horrible job of hiding the dialog for managing named ranges. Easy to create them but knowing where they are is a PITA.
It's way more structured, and doesn't rely on 2D spatial layouts that work very poorly on mobile.
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Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has. Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB l…
You might want to try out Baserow ( https://baserow.io ). It’s an open source alternative to Airtable, backed by a PostgreSQL database. Main differences are that you can self host it with unlimited rows, it’s modular and it’s made to handle high volumes of data. Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow.
My own take on spreadsheets2.0 is https://www.jigdev.com It's mostly inspired from how we use spreadsheets on wall street: a frontend for complex data applications (basically a wysiwyg interface with a DAG repl). Technically, jig is an observable notebook where the cells are spread on a canvas rather than in top/down notebook.
I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg ( https://www.ultorg.com/ ) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen. UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update. The result is essentially a general purp…
> UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". That's how AirTable is described as well. And Google Tables. And Amazon Honeycode.
I've been thinking about this a ton lately - I think the holy grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent in power to a Jupyter notebook. This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formul…
You know, despite being quite different than what you described, what comes close for me in concept is the Spyder IDE. They have pretty reasonable data visualization tools when you go to inspect variables. I find it really nice work in. It lets me do the real visualization and interplay between variables in code or in my head and just quickly inspect tables/vectors/rasters to sanity check as I work in real time. What…
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They've always done a horrible job of hiding the dialog for managing named ranges. Easy to create them but knowing where they are is a PITA.
you mean the enormous drop-down on the left at the top? Where it shows the current cell, and you can type to replace the value with a name?
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100% I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just... UGH. Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation. There HAS to be a unfilled niche here. nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I…
Access was pretty incredible for what it is/was. I could build a structured database with a nice UI for non-data people, reports, and even more advanced things like automated emails, exports, etc., in 1/10th or even 1/20th the time it'd take to build something similar as a web app. We had an Access database that managed grant funding for an entire public University and in many ways it worked a lot better than the Saa…
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100% I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just... UGH. Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation. There HAS to be a unfilled niche here. nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I…
We are trying to answer this with CloudTables ( https://cloudtables.com ) - which is effectively a GUI for my DataTables library with a Postgres backend. Current work is to address the row limit and allow millions of rows without needing to contact "sales" (me), while also not charging per user (I hate that as a customer). If anyone fancies giving it a go and dropping me some feedback that would be most welcome! Ther…