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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

#111

Post by breckognize »

7thaccount wrote: post #102

A better Excel sounds nice, but the problem is Excel is already on my computer and used by everyone. It's a universal format for most people in the business world. If your product is really that superior, I wish Microsoft would just buy y'all out and rewrite Excel from scratch using your product. I guess they can't do to infinite backwards capability needs as half the world prob runs off Excel spreadsheets.

The reason we launched a hosted product first is to get around the chicken and egg problem you describe. You can create a workbook and just share a link with a colleague - they don't have to install anything. If you turn on link-sharing under the workbook's "Share" menu, they don't need an account either. The cloud also provides some powerful performance advantages.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#112

Post by skadamat »

ozim wrote: post #33
skadamat wrote: post #14

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 online still struggles to work with databases well. In classic disruption theory (the real theory by Clayton, not the TechCrunch 'disruption'), these products have less features but are simpler and can win the low-end of the market then move up-market over time.

I suspect that people glued to M365 ecosystem are the LAST ones to consider leaving Excel online, but that's okay!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#114

Post by otoburb »

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…

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 permissions hell.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#115

Post by _trampeltier »

wdh505 wrote: post #52
dustingetz wrote: post #39

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.

In Teams you can not work on a Excel Sheet shared in a chat. You have to share it in a Team .. you have to ask the IT to create a Team for you first .. great.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#117

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#118

Post by billylitt »

ramoneguru wrote: post #104
gamegoblin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Sheets is banned in our households, we planned our neighborhood block party in Row Zero! Tech stack: Everything runs on AWS Frontend: TypeScript + some Rust compiled to WASM, our own virtualized custom canvas magic Backend: Rust, Apache Arrow The biggest tech challenges... where to start. 1. As with any editor application, Undo/Redo is devilishly hard 2. A spreadsheet is modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph whe…

Nice work, did you start off by looking at any previously built canvas-like spreadsheets or was it straight to "virtualized custom canvas magic"? I interviewed at a spreadsheet company (for a frontend role) and they asked, "how would you go about determining what cells need a border when a user clicks an individual cell, clicks a cell and selects multiple cells, clicks a cell next to an already selected cell." Fascin…

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 nuance to drawing borders on adjacent cells, how to handle varying thickness, etc. Once you start looking closely, you notice the pixel differences between how this gets handled by various spreadsheeting tools.

Thanks for the report! This one's already on my list actually (selection negation & unique selection deduping) -- look for a fix soon.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#120

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]
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