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Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

rowzero.io

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Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#51
post #42

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

Do you sell a software or a service running in a browser? Is the computation happening on my computer or your cloud?

All computation happens in the cloud. This is really nice because we can scale up and down to fit your data size.

If you need a supercomputer for 30 minutes, we can get you one.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferior to a native app. Navigating it with the keyboard is clunky, the UI is never as crisp and responsive, it's harder to save and open files... the list goes on

Is it true? Google sheets is great, google docs is great, and hyperlinks! How much native app fast UX is due to using local state on disk? The future is not on local disk!

Microsoft teams has the option to open all shared files in the browser so you can have multiple "teams" Microsoft files open at once. This is the direction spreadsheets are going.

I agree it feels clunky to me who grew up on excel the application. I memorized a few dozen keyboard shortcuts that are all broken in the "teams collaboration browser spreadsheet" sigh.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#53
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true? Google sheets is great, google docs is great, and hyperlinks! How much native app fast UX is due to using local state on disk? The future is not on local disk!

Microsoft teams has the option to open all shared files in the browser so you can have multiple "teams" Microsoft files open at once. This is the direction spreadsheets are going. I agree it feels clunky to me who grew up on excel the application. I memorized a few dozen keyboard shortcuts that are all broken in the "teams collaboration browser spreadsheet" sigh.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#54

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.

I wont be surprised if someone acquires them. This looks really well engineered and it gets shit done as they say.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true? Google sheets is great, google docs is great, and hyperlinks! How much native app fast UX is due to using local state on disk? The future is not on local disk!

Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Maybe making networked drives better is another problem that needs solving, but I don't think spreadsheet applications should disregard that and just hope everyone moves to online. At a minimum you should give…

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network.

Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work!

pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#56

I'm a bit obsessed about spreadsheets and as someone who's building something similar (but not identical), it feels great to see all these next-gen spreadsheets on HN. Spreadsheets are hard to do and even harder to do right, so congrats on launching—although given your backgrounds I don't think you ever lacked the manpower to let this be a technical challenge ;-) My initial reaction: * It does feel pretty fast * but…

> * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX What do you mean by this? Inferior to a standalone app? Inferior to some other design in general?

For certain apps, it feels much more comfortably mentally compartmentalized when that focus is not in browser... (this is just my opinion), but I find that I typically have so many tabs open - I like to have certain things on not my browser (at times a tab can crash the whole browser)

Attempting to import from various sources (urls and upload) and it fails:

https://i.imgur.com/YV865bw.png

It also stalls for a really long time arttempting to link to large CSV URLS... and it fails on JSON.

This 37kb CSV file took over a minute to load:

https://i.imgur.com/tHN4Wq0.png

It has ONE ROW.

I assume im holding it wrong, the local CSV has thousands of rows:

https://i.imgur.com/fujf1p5.png

---

I had to reload the session to get it to allow import, and this 37... and it took 24 seconds to import the data:

https://i.imgur.com/LnFIgL3.png

Linking to a URL and hitting import it thinks for a bit or fails....

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#57

As someone who used to work on Excel, awesome work and congrats on the launch! I get that it's easy to bash on VBA, but I'd argue it's what made Excel what it is today (though maybe not the language/runtime per se, but rather the ergonomics). I feel pretty confident saying that probably 5% of the world's economy runs on VBA macros that were started by some eager worker that was tired of doing repetitive tasks and won…

I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Maybe making networked drives better is another problem that needs solving, but I don't think spreadsheet applications should disregard that and just hope everyone moves to online. At a minimum you should give…

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen

And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#59
post #33

Honestly, I'm really excited about this next generation of spreadsheet software. - Causal.app - Rows.com - Equals.com - and at least 50 others I've found I'm waiting for someone to create a really high performant spreadsheet engine that runs in WASM to power even more spreadsheet-y applications. The direct manipulation of spreadsheets is super underrated.

I just wonder how come there is market for these when Microsoft has Excel online. Any company that has O365 has Excel online as well.

Excel is really great if you don't have too much data. We love Excel! But we just had too much data for it, so we built the solution we wanted.

We can handle 100x more data than Excel (online or desktop), Google Sheets, etc.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#60

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

How does this compare to sheetsjs?
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