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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

#211

Post by emeril »

gamegoblin wrote: post #209
emeril wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't copy and paste formulas to more than one cell at a time? if I highlight a range of cells to copy something to, only the last cell will be populated?

We didn't know about this formula-paste-to-range functionality, we will add it in the next few days as we grind down this post-launch backlog. Let us know any other stuff we are missing please! In the mean time you can still paste the formula to the top cell then drag it down or ctrl+D as a workaround, but we want to support the full experience, so check back in a few days and it should be there :)

I've been the excel/vba resource at various consulting firms for 20+ years...

I strongly recommend you enlist some people like me to kick the tires on your product before a more wide roll-out

among other things, I'd make an effort to implement as many standard excel functions as possible

--> I would LOVE a highly performant version of google sheets (though ideally as a desktop style app) so I can use keyboard shortcuts among other reasons

--> one thing I like about google sheets that you don't have is that it has excel style short-cuts like alt+d+f+f for autofilter... (though I really only use google sheets as a grocery list so I can walk through my house and do an inventory using my phone)

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#212

Post by gamegoblin »

emeril wrote: post #211
gamegoblin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't know about this formula-paste-to-range functionality, we will add it in the next few days as we grind down this post-launch backlog. Let us know any other stuff we are missing please! In the mean time you can still paste the formula to the top cell then drag it down or ctrl+D as a workaround, but we want to support the full experience, so check back in a few days and it should be there :)

I've been the excel/vba resource at various consulting firms for 20+ years... I strongly recommend you enlist some people like me to kick the tires on your product before a more wide roll-out among other things, I'd make an effort to implement as many standard excel functions as possible --> I would LOVE a highly performant version of google sheets (though ideally as a desktop style app) so I can use keyboard shortcu…

We have a super fast iteration cycle, so most times a user asks us for a feature parity thing like this, we can ship it within 24 hours. This particular one might be slow for us, a few days :)

If we waited until we had full Excel parity, we would never ship. Google Sheets has been around for 17 years and still doesn't have full Excel parity on features or functions, and that's with dozens of engineers working on it full time.

Luckily now that we are launched we have a bunch of very knowledgable people like you requesting all these features, and this gives us a really good signal for prioritization.

E.g. a bunch of other people also requested the alt-shortcuts, so they are pretty high priority

Highest priority are the bugs like jkaptur pointed out above, and some other people had some crazy CSV files that we couldn't parse. So I'll fix those today and get to the copy-paste-formula-to-range thing in the next day or two. Alt shortcuts is very high on our frontend guy's list.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#213

Post by prometheus76 »

breckognize wrote: post #98
prometheus76 wrote: post #92

Excel has a top-to-bottom, left-to-right calculation order of cells, which can mess things up if you aren't careful. How does your engine handle calc execution order?

The spreadsheet DAG is derived from the formulas. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting . Let me know if I'm misunderstanding!

This video explains better what I'm thinking of. He has built a 16-bit computer in Excel, and where he put the different formulas for the different parts of the computer on the sheet affected how it worked (he basically had to change his design because of how Excel calculates). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#214

Post by emeril »

gamegoblin wrote: post #212
emeril wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been the excel/vba resource at various consulting firms for 20+ years... I strongly recommend you enlist some people like me to kick the tires on your product before a more wide roll-out among other things, I'd make an effort to implement as many standard excel functions as possible --> I would LOVE a highly performant version of google sheets (though ideally as a desktop style app) so I can use keyboard shortcu…

We have a super fast iteration cycle, so most times a user asks us for a feature parity thing like this, we can ship it within 24 hours. This particular one might be slow for us, a few days :) If we waited until we had full Excel parity, we would never ship. Google Sheets has been around for 17 years and still doesn't have full Excel parity on features or functions, and that's with dozens of engineers working on it f…

I wish you luck, I can definitely appreciate the difficulty in trying to achieving some degree of excel feature parity

I had come across this copy to more than one cell issue when I was curious to see the performance myself in making some random numbers and doing some look-ups based on those results which I couldn't do en masse due to this limitation

a few other things to think about implementing

(1) some more formatting/font/point size options

(2) customizable number formatting like excel

(3) functions like hlookup, edate, perhaps even array function like functionality (i.e., a relatively powerful and open ended underused feature in excel due to a combination of difficulty in understanding as well as being very slow calculation-wise)

(4) some minimal vector drawing abilities

(5) it doesn't bother me and it's part of your marketing but starting with "0" may confuse some people (and would break excel compatibility) since excel doesn't do that (though I appreciate indices/etc. do that in "real" programming)

(6) filtering data doesn't include a "contain" or "does not contain" option

(7) perhaps some limited ability to customize the interface and have user defined keyboard shortcuts triggering formatting/etc. type macros/python

(8) some sort of print/formatting to yield output to pdf

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#215

Post by gamegoblin »

emeril wrote: post #214
gamegoblin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a super fast iteration cycle, so most times a user asks us for a feature parity thing like this, we can ship it within 24 hours. This particular one might be slow for us, a few days :) If we waited until we had full Excel parity, we would never ship. Google Sheets has been around for 17 years and still doesn't have full Excel parity on features or functions, and that's with dozens of engineers working on it f…

I wish you luck, I can definitely appreciate the difficulty in trying to achieving some degree of excel feature parity I had come across this copy to more than one cell issue when I was curious to see the performance myself in making some random numbers and doing some look-ups based on those results which I couldn't do en masse due to this limitation a few other things to think about implementing (1) some more format…

Thank you for all the feedback!

1. Our frontend guy has been dreading this but it is high on the list nonetheless :)

2. Somewhat lower down the list but we have heard this before too

3. I have array functionality on a branch, still ironing out some rough edges, might be a month or two before we land it for real. We can add those builtins hlookup & edate very quickly.

4. We haven't heard anyone request vector drawing before. Can you elaborate on the use case? Sounds interesting.

5. Re: Row 0, we have funnily heard a lot of Excel people always wanted it, because they tend to have headers at the top, and it always bothered them referring to their data starting at A2 instead of A1. It's not a compatibility issue for import from Excel, because we just import all the data starting at A1. It can be a problem for export to Excel (which we don't have yet, but will), but we will just shift everything down by 1 row as if you had done a giant cut-paste.

6. For string types we have "contains" but we don't have "does not contain", will add it. Excel allows you to do "contains" on number types too which we thought nobody actually wanted, but if you do want it, we can add it. There are some performance implications to this because it means you have to convert numbers to strings to do the check.

7. More customization is probably farther down the line when we grow more.

8. Yes, right now we can only output to CSV. We have had some people talk about how they want to output to Powerpoint slides, PDF, etc. This is definitely on our radar.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#216

Post by sidcool »

gamegoblin wrote: post #210
sidcool wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me for probing further. Can you share some of the books that can help with this? Which algorithms were used, how etc. Thank in advance, I am using Row Zero since yesterday and loving it thoroughly.

I don't have any great book recommendations because I learned on the job mostly. For a project that will teach you literally everything there is to know about backend development: 1. Write a simple PUT/GET/DELETE REST API network layer, this should be a few hundred lines of code max depending on how much you choose to lean on libraries vs write it yourself 2. Then, write a simple in-memory blob store behind the PUT/G…

Thanks! Appreciate your detailed response!!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#217

Post by fragmede »

gamegoblin wrote: post #195
fragmede wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XLSX is an open format, why invent another? xkcd 927 python in the app needs to be wholly self contained so whatever the backend it uses, it's separate from anything else on the system. charge through the nose for desktop clients because of how much it costs in development and support time. people who want native clients so it's not up on a cloud somewhere for whatever reason can pay for that privilege.

I implemented an Excel format processor and the Excel format does not lend itself well to super-high-performance for large datasets unfortunately

Good to know! I haven't thought about this as deeply as you have, so if you have justification for making your own new format, go for it!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#218

Post by petr_tik »

gamegoblin wrote: post #3

Hello all, I'm Grant, founding engineer at Row Zero. Working on this spreadsheet engine has been one of the most exciting, complex, and stimulating engineering experiences of my career. Feel free to ask any technical questions about the product. We're really proud of what we've build and what's on the roadmap!

Are you hiring or will you be later in the year?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#219

Post by voltaireodactyl »

JoiDegn wrote: post #193
voltaireodactyl wrote: post #192

This may be way off course but I’m currently looking for a QuickBooks replacement with many of the features you describe. Is building a QB replacement possible within your app, if we can bring our own financial data?

What are some of the features you are looking for? Just curious because Im working on a Quickbook replacement probably with a different focus but I'd still love to hear what you need.

Would love to talk further — if you email me at the address in my profile, I’ll get the current wishlist from our accounting dept on Monday. FWIW accounting needs are similar across all talent agency workflows and nobody’s happy, so there’s an undeserved market here for sure.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#220

Post by bburnett44 »

antisthenes wrote: post #107
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…

Help me understand this. You generate 1gb of critical financial data...that most of your Excel die-hard users can't actually use because their computer can't handle it. How does your org complete any work then?

lol excel isn't the only data analysis tool
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