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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

#181

Post by lancewiggs »

breckognize wrote: post #150
lancewiggs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a bug, but I'm having trouble reproducing. If you share repro steps with breck at rowzero.io, we'll get it fixed.

I’m in New Zealand if that helps. Generally (please) don’t assume location dictates formatting, while Excel’s assumptions are often incorrect and so custom formatting is a requirement.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#182

Post by emeril »

breckognize wrote: post #156
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I live in excel in a multibillion dollar company as the "excel" guru... though my company doesn't really have big data generally speaking

I would love a performant desktop excel replacement - I miss using excel 2003 - it has been downhill ever since...

That said, I'm clearly not the target market for this product though I believe there's some degree of frustration with how poorly modern excel works with many files now which this product may address.

I would guess that making this a light-weight and performant (not electron) desktop app (ideally portable so installing it wouldn't require admin access) with substantial feature parity and compatibility with excel would be a big deal - I'd install it right away...

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#183

Post by nojvek »

One of the powers of excel is that it is your data on your machine. You can work fully offline, no SaaS monthly crap.

Row zero is nice, don’t get me wrong. But the whole idea of me giving them gigabytes of data, or the creds to production database is a big no no.

If a 3rd party has your creds, they will eventually get hacked.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#185

Post by emeril »

jasongill wrote: post #11

This looks really promising. We generate about 1gb of financial CSV files per day for finance/accounting/audit teams and the number one response is "wow this data is great, but my computer just can't handle it". The biggest issue that I think I would run into in my organization is that all of the spreadsheet lovers are Excel die-hards and they refuse to even use Google Sheets, not to mention something else that isn't…

omg dude - shouldn't these users be querying a database in some capacity where this data resides in the first place?

perhaps via some more "accountant friendly" app than SQL?

That said, I suppose that's partly the goal of this product... a visual/faster alternative to SQL though I personally avoid putting big data in excel, I just (as an accountant myself) carve out subsets from SQL and then peruse it via excel to identify whatever transactions/activity I need to analyze since the web interface for the ERP is such slow steaming garbage...

I'm more in search of a better excel than an excel which can handle big data as I suspect many users will somehow, no matter how well this is built, make it slow/terrible whereas an SQL based approach could be multiple of orders of magnitude faster....

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#188

Post by quickthrower2 »

lancewiggs wrote: post #181
breckognize wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a bug, but I'm having trouble reproducing. If you share repro steps with breck at rowzero.io, we'll get it fixed.

I’m in New Zealand if that helps. Generally (please) don’t assume location dictates formatting, while Excel’s assumptions are often incorrect and so custom formatting is a requirement.

You can’t even assume location dictates location!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#189

Post by QuinnyPig »

gamegoblin wrote: post #45
Kluggy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was at AWS for 5 years from 2015 to 2020. It seems unlikely that he wrote the filesystem that powers s3. Improved, absolutely. His partner was a manager, not an engineer, per https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-... Personally I don’t like this sort of puffery in funding slides nor announcements.

All our backend engineers were on the S3 filesystem team. I'm Grant Slatton, founding engineer at Row Zero, and before this I designed and led the team that built S3's new filesystem, ShardStore (check out this paper https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bornholt/papers/shardstore-sosp21... ). Our other Row Zero backend engineers (Breck, Erich, Greg) were all on the team. Our frontend guy is ex-Airtable.

Oooh! Your reputation precedes you.

Please, please, please put an “about us” page on your site. People get leery when there aren’t named humans identified as being behind a product that’s asking for production data access.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#190

Post by sidcool »

gamegoblin wrote: post #80
sidcool wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the data modelled and persisted? What database and how is conflict handled? CRDT?

We use Apache Arrow data format, so it's fairly columnar. We have built some custom layers on top of Arrow as well to handle some fancier data types. For storage and orchestration we use S3 and Dynamo. Yes exactly, we use CRDTs for multiplayer stuff.

Thanks! A digressing question. How does one go about learning to build an amazing platform line Row Zero?
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