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Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

rows.com

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Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#31
post #28

I often wonder about products like this. It seems to me that access solved many of these problems years ago then just faded away. I don't know why, I don't know why these are better either. Other than being collaborative and in the cloud. Those are huge benefits but why didn't access carry on to the cloud? I feel like I'm missing some understanding of the low code space. I'd like to learn these tools one day to allow…

I have a theory that SQL Server made so much cash that Microsoft didn’t want Access to eat its lunch. It could have made a lot of progress in the last 25 years even with a reasonably small team.

Honestly something that could start as a local Access file and later be “hosted” on-premises for collaborative usage and later move to (e.g. Microsoft’s) cloud for wider usage/easy hosting would be useful to a lot of folk. The forms etc could migrate to HTML (rendered via local webviews / websites on a users browser).

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#33
post #29

Anybody know of a decent process embeddable spreadsheet engine, not web embedded in website embedding, but linked in process. Ideally C++. I ended up taking sc-im codebase and wrestling with it to embed it in a system. Old school I know but it works.

Would Excel interop work? It's not in the same process and horribly inefficient but will always result in Excel compatible spreadsheets. https://www.chriswirz.com/software/excel-cpp-2019

I’m interested in higher performance and don’t really care about file or data output. I can also deal with the UI issues.

Basically it’s the core calculation and formula engine I was hoping was implemented as a library that could be plugged into another application.

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#34
post #7

At this point, can all new "super spreadsheet" products please come with a standardised proforma comparing them to the other 50 super spreadsheet apps along a set of standardised comparison points please? I genuinely do not have the time to compare between this, air table, Monday.com, smart sheet, etc etc etc

I hear you, but you know it is not much different than the variety of programming languages or frameworks we are used to. I think there is still a huge market for new spreadsheet apps. Some will succeed and most will not. At this point my hot favorite ones I would like to learn more about are grid.is, rows.com and equals.com. But I am sure there are tons I don't know

I get your point, but at least they don't expect me to pay them money for the privilege of finding out what they actually do (assuming we're talking open source ones).

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Excel interop work? It's not in the same process and horribly inefficient but will always result in Excel compatible spreadsheets. https://www.chriswirz.com/software/excel-cpp-2019

I’m interested in higher performance and don’t really care about file or data output. I can also deal with the UI issues. Basically it’s the core calculation and formula engine I was hoping was implemented as a library that could be plugged into another application.

Okay, in that case not a good option.

Good luck, that sounds like a very useful tool you're building.

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#37

Impressive domain. How much did that cost? Would it be too cynical of me to ask if I'll be seeing advertisements for Rows.com on every subway platform from London to New York?

$110k USD. We won’t do subway ads.. not in the next years at least.

https://rows.com/blog/post/why-and-how-we-rebranded

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#38
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dont stop there, can you remember some examples?

Navigating using the keyboard, drag/drop for reordering rows/columns (in a way that wasn't painful), conditional formatting on ranges of cells. At the end of the day, we actually didn't want or need the rigid structure we thought we did .... or at least it wasn't worth giving up the polish of Sheets.

Tks for elaborating! I’m the founder of Rows

it’s not clear to me if that comparison is with Rows or another product

Rows is built to be as flexible as any other spreadsheet

- You can add whatever you want in a cell, literals, formulas, we even support json as a primitive type. - we got the same formulas vlookup sum sumifs filter query, plus hundreds new ones like get, put, post, schedule, expand - we got conditional formatting (not as powerful as sheets, we will get there). - we we got shortcuts, above it all ctrl-k/ Cmd-k, but also many block navigation ones (ctrl+arrow, Cmd+arrow), excel windows compatible shortcuts (f2/f4), and a bunch of others.

Anything in particular you think is a dealbreaker for you?

Re: Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

#39
post #28

I often wonder about products like this. It seems to me that access solved many of these problems years ago then just faded away. I don't know why, I don't know why these are better either. Other than being collaborative and in the cloud. Those are huge benefits but why didn't access carry on to the cloud? I feel like I'm missing some understanding of the low code space. I'd like to learn these tools one day to allow…

Rows isn’t for apps. It’s for spreadsheets proper.

Just that Rows assumes 2 things:

1. you got to import data from your cloud tools (SaaS like GoogleAnalytics, BigQuery, Looker, Ads platforms,… and your own custom APIs). It’s hard to do on excel and sheets, not flexible and hard to automate.

2. You want to share spreadsheets in a way they render well on mobile.

That’s why we made rows (im a founder)

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