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Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

rowzero.io

151–160 of 225 posts

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#151
Quick bug report: I set A0 and A1 to 1, then set A2 =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1. As expected, A2 evaluated to 4. Then I right-clicked on the 1 row header and inserted 1 row above.

Expected: A3 should become =SUM(A0:A2)+A0+A2 and evaluate to 4

Actual: A3 becomes =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A2 and remains 4 until it is edited, at which point it evaluates to 3.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#152

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…

This looks like something that I could use right away, but I wonder, since we can write Python, does this mean that we can write back to one of the native backends (e.g. Postgres)? Currently, the only way to do this from Excel (e.g. saving a snapshot of an analyst's current dashboard that they just built) is through a macro, which then starts the (understandable) descent into Excel's External Content and Trust Center…

It’s worth noting that Excel supports Python now as well.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#153

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?

Datafusion, Polars, and us are all based on Arrow. Datafusion is more targeting database users, Polars is targeting Python programmers/dataframe users, and we are targeting spreadsheet users.

They are all ultimately just different UIs on top of Arrow.

They're complimentary tools. We can take data out of the spreadsheet and put it into Polars instantly (you can do this in the Python code window if you want), etc.

Regarding why not implement our spreadsheet built on top of those: spreadsheet allow for heterogenous types in columns, so that requires a lot of extra infrastructure to manage, whereas Datafusion and Polars require homogenous column types.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#154
post #137

Do you have any simd-optim in parsing all those large files ? I have read that you write some of your own parser for perf boost. (I am one of the author of https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath )

No SIMD in the parser path... yet... :) The main win from writing our own custom parser is writing directly into the final in-memory format from the parse stream without any intermediate allocations or data movement. Awesome project! Adding it to my list of things we may plug into in the future.

Sealable spreadsheet is also awesome ! Congrats for the delivery.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#155

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 finan…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#156

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…

Can you make it a desktop application?

We have development desktop builds. A few product questions for you:

Would you be ok with a new file format or do we need to save to .xlsx?

How important is Python in a desktop version? Would you need integration with conda or virtualenv?

How much do you think we should charge?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Excel compatible: https://rowzero.io/docs/spreadsheet-functions If we're missing any formulas you need, message me at breck at rowzero.io and we'll add them (usually within 24 hours).

You'll also need formatting to be the same to get adoption. e.g. I wanted to format numbers as currency, and got USD$x,xxx as a result, and no obvious way to change that to $x,xxx.

and the translations in the millions localizations not compatible with english formulae

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#158
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if your service is acquired and shut down? Is there any local fallback?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#159

Quick bug report: I set A0 and A1 to 1, then set A2 =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1. As expected, A2 evaluated to 4. Then I right-clicked on the 1 row header and inserted 1 row above. Expected: A3 should become =SUM(A0:A2)+A0+A2 and evaluate to 4 Actual: A3 becomes =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A2 and remains 4 until it is edited, at which point it evaluates to 3.

I just tested in Excel and Google Sheets and our behavior matches them here, unless I am misunderstanding the repro steps.

For me, A3 becomes =SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 and remains 4 as it should be.

The action I am taking:

    A0=1
    A1=1
    A2=SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1 (evaluates to 4)
Right click A0 and click "insert row above"

Now I have:

    A0=empty
    A1=1
    A2=1
    A3=SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 (evaluates to 4)
Thank you for trying to find edge cases! I have put literally hundreds of hours into stuff like this. Let me know if you have different repro steps.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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?

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

Indeed. In addition to the UI issues, there's no way this product can be "the fastest spreadsheet" when it's browser-based. By definition it runs at least ten times slower than native apps will.
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