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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

#41

Post by vcool07 »

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…

How is this different from Power BI ? Or is this software on similar lines as Power BI ?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#42

Post by ant6n »

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…

Do you sell a software or a service running in a browser? Is the computation happening on my computer or your cloud?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#43

Post by breckognize »

WillAdams wrote: post #18
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.

Are any of these multi-dimensional? Still looking for a replacement Lotus Improv (can't justify Quantrix Financial).

Row Zero supports Python pandas, which handles multi-dimensional data. So you can process your data with Pandas in the code window and then view "2d slices" of that data in the spreadsheet UI. Feel free to message me at breck at rowzero.io if you'd like to do a session together to get you started.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#44

Post by airstrike »

dustingetz wrote: post #39
airstrike wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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!

Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it

But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Maybe making networked drives better is another problem that needs solving, but I don't think spreadsheet applications should disregard that and just hope everyone moves to online. At a minimum you should give users a choice (which Excel/Office does, by the way)

And we still haven't talked about navigating the UI with the keyboard. Limiting power users to online-only is like telling vim users they have to use Notepad++. Sure, they can do everything they could in vim, but it's overall objectively worse

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#45

Post by gamegoblin »

Kluggy wrote: post #29
codegeek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.

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.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#47

Post by padjo »

strongpigeon wrote: post #35

As someone who used to work on Excel, awesome work and congrats on the launch! I get that it's easy to bash on VBA, but I'd argue it's what made Excel what it is today (though maybe not the language/runtime per se, but rather the ergonomics). I feel pretty confident saying that probably 5% of the world's economy runs on VBA macros that were started by some eager worker that was tired of doing repetitive tasks and won…

VBA macros were my route from teenager in a warehouse to a 20+ year career in software development

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#48

Post by breckognize »

vcool07 wrote: post #41
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…

How is this different from Power BI ? Or is this software on similar lines as Power BI ?

We're a spreadsheet-first UI. If you're familiar with the Microsoft suite, we're more like a hosted Excel plus Power Query, but way easier to use.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#49

Post by sdenton4 »

eichin wrote: post #19

https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/ has a 1.5G (in excel-binary save form) spreadsheet that would make an entertaining benchmark (not a particularly relevant one for your target market, unless you want to get into "frightening educational tools for AI researchers" which is not a notably excel-friendly space - just a hilarious one.)

A similarly important benchmark is DOOM fps: https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw?si=YNuNBDS7ti8gmpqc

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#50

Post by gamegoblin »

serjester wrote: post #46

I'd love to see a generative AI integration (hopefully something far better than Google's attempt). I tried to figure out how to write a python function and quickly got lost. Seems promising though.

It's very high on the list for post-launch feature additions

Copilot for formulas, auto-write python, etc, it'll all land soon!

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