Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

rowzero.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 225 posts

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#131

Post by cyrialize »

strongpigeon wrote: post #35

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…

One of my previous work places with an auditing data set company.

We'd collect data sets from various sources (like public filings from the SEC) and the we'd send them over to different research teams to enrich the data in various ways.

That company was very Excel heavy - which made sense, we had data entry, accountants, and other people who worked in finance.

My CTO told me a story about how one day a member of a research team asked for a new computer. The old computer worked fine, but the employee wrote a VBA script in Excel that would crunch data... and wouldn't finish until 3 days later.

This employee wanted a new computer so that he had one to use while the other one was crunching data.

We ended up taking his VBA script and putting it into our codebase.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#132

Post by breckognize »

LoganDark wrote: post #122
breckognize wrote: post #2

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…

Your spreadsheet experience was plugged by "no first-class Python support"? What makes Python special here?

Nothing in particular. I'd have been happy with anything that has a real open source community around it, which VBA doesn't. For data tasks, Python's a natural choice. We've also had requests for R, which is on our roadmap.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#133

Post by nolongerthere »

breckognize wrote: post #2

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…

The power of excel is that everyone has it and most people have a ton of familiarity with it and there’s a million results for anything you search Google that you don’t know how to do. Basically, all the network effects, bec you’re right if excel were a new product today it would lose to every single competitor that does it much better.

Are you compatible with excel functions?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#134

Post by glitchc »

breckognize wrote: post #83
Terretta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting from a place of "I want to start providing this to my employees yesterday"... I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it. For example, the docs show the product wants static creds for a Postgres database or signed URL for S3 bucket instead of leveraging best-practice service-to-service identity and access management. Maybe you suppo…

For S3 specifically, we support IAM-based role assumption. If you go to Data > Import from Amazon S3 > Add S3 Bucket, you can grant our AWS account permissions to read an S3 bucket in your account. We also have dedicated hosting options for our Enterprise tier. If there's a specific data source you'd like us to support OAuth integration for, let me know, and we'll add it.

> you can grant our AWS account permissions to read an S3 bucket in your account.

That seems like a huge privacy hole. It sounds like you're offering spreadsheet-as-a-service, where you scale up AWS spot instances based on query size.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#135

Post by billylitt »

alooPotato wrote: post #124
billylitt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Row Zero frontend dev here -- when architecting, we looked at some off-the-shelf canvas-based table tools, but ultimately rolled our engine for more control & flexibility with our growing feature set. We elected for canvas over DOM for perf among other reasons (eg DOM scrollbar virtualization is hard when MAX_ROW * ROW_HEIGHT exceeds the maximum allowed browser element height). Great interview question. Tons of nuanc…

Did you look at https://grid.glideapps.com/ by chance for rendering? Curious what it didn't support if you did.

I don't remember looking at Glide, although it looks really nice & full-featured. I'll have to play around with it sometime. I do remember trying out https://www.npmjs.com/package/@deephaven/grid.

One pivotal feature that is difficult to map onto 3P tools is our data table UI, which is a separate scrollable grid that floats on top of the main sheet. That, combined with the complexity of formula selection, inserting buttons into cells (header dropdowns, filter, sort), led us to decide that rolling our own solution for full control was the right choice.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#136

Post by fallingsprings »

Out of curiosity, do you support/have plans to support the broader set of Excel shortcuts that reference the ribbon? (Alt + shortcuts). Lots of excel power users more or less exclusively use the keyboard to navigate, and so have muscle memory for almost everything they do, including more niche operations (Insert Line Chart = Alt N N 1, or Change Column Width = Alt H O W).

Will be a very hard sell to banks/other financial services corps if you can't match that aspect of excel. (They will probably also want local files and a native app).

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#138

Post by chadash »

breckognize wrote: post #72
chadash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to: 1) Signup for an account 2) Create a workbook 3) Click share and put in friend's email 4) They get an invite 5) Now they need to sign up 6) They can edit my doc I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love t…

After you create a workbook, click the checkbox under Share > Anyone with link can view. Then your friend doesn't need to create an account.

This allows them to view but not to edit

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#139

Post by benpacker »

breckognize wrote: post #2

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…

Why build a custom arrow based columnar engine in Rust instead of using Datafusion or Polars?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#140

Post by tiffanyh »

breckognize wrote: post #2

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…

Hi.

Your product looks great.

Would you mind helping me understand the differences between RowZero and something like Equals.com?

Post reply on HN