7 ms·

Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

229 points by dnprock 11y ago

codezero 11y ago
Looks neat, but currently getting a 503 error on one of the scripts in all the examples: https://rawgit.com/replit/jq-console/master/jqconsole.min.js https://rawgit.com/replit/jq-console/master/jqconsole.min.js
- timdorr 11y ago
  It should be on cdn.rawgit.com in production: https://rawgit.com/ https://rawgit.com/
- dnprock 11y ago
  Thanks. Forgot to change to cdn version. Fixed now.
sswezey 11y ago
This is already possibly with Google Spreadsheets albeit this is a much nicer interface.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  > albeit this is a much nicer interface And, if I understand correctly, this could be rolled into something like Jupyter. Which would be awesome!
SixSigma 11y ago
While I appreciate the idea.... Use Javascript to replace vba in excel http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-does-javascript-a-vba-developer-s-perspective.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-... Use python to replace vba in excel http://xlwings.org/ http://xlwings.org/
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Yeah it's not really "new". Lotus Improv was doing this 25 years ago, for those of us old fogeys who remember. 1-2-3 was for the secretaries, Improv for the power users. Also, I know know of plenty of financial institutions that have mod'd Excel with Add-ins to the point where the Worksheet integrity is better than 95% of the RDBMS' I've worked with. Version controlled, full audit trails, access control lists, type validation... Hell out of the box, you can get an out of the box Excel + SQL Server BI to essentially make an off-the-cuff Line of Business app, completely sync'd, with a Silverlight front similar to (this)[http://www.infragistics.com/uploadedImages/Content/PRODUCTS/Silverlight_DV/Controls/Pivot_Grid/silverlight-pivot-grid-silverlight-business-intelligence-dv.jpg http://www.infragistics.com/uploadedImages/Content/PRODUCTS/...]
- headcanon 11y ago
  True, but having a feature isn't necessarily the same as having it front-and-center as part of the experience. Also, that JS API you have linked looks pretty verbose and clunky compared to OPs.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
donpdonp 11y ago
while i dont have much of an opinion of js in a spreadsheet except "neat!", the website design and text is spot-on in that I understood in an instant what the project does! Kudos.
pikzen 11y ago
Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.
- dang 11y ago
  Please don't be mean and dismissive in response to new work. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
  - pikzen 11y ago
    I'm having trouble finding anything useful in a new, nonstandard spreadsheet software whose only interest is that you can use Javascript. But it's branded as a "new kind" of software, so it must be good :^)
    - dang 11y ago
      As the Show HN guidelines say: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is." But you also needn't trample over someone's freshly planted garden. Helpful criticism is fine. Asking a question is fine (a real question, not a gotcha one designed to make someone look bad); for example, one could ask "what do you mean when you say this is a new kind of spreadsheet?" Pointing out similarities to other work is fine. All we want to avoid is being dismissive. Since the line isn't obvious (especially to a million readers), simply err on the side of not being. On HN, new work doesn't need to be useful, just alive. One can't always predict what will turn out to be useful anyhow. Everybody showing new work deserves a minimal baseline of respect here. If you know more and have done more than someone else has, that's great. That's an opportunity to teach and to share, not put them down. Edit: since "new kind of spreadsheet" is arguably a bit baity we've changed to the HTML doc title.
      - Myrmornis 11y ago
OmarIsmail 11y ago
Nice work! I noticed that you're using a web-worker, does all the heavy lifting happen there and the main thread is used for purely rendering? I'm noticing some lag when I just press enter into a cell twice (once to get into edit, and then again to get out). Any idea what's going on there (I'm interested technically)?
j2kun 11y ago
Can I drop in any .js file I want that defines appropriate functions?
- sangd 11y ago
  Yes, you can. You can either paste the code in the Javascript tab, or add the hosted .js file in the Settings.
- dnprock 11y ago
  Yes, you can load any JS library to call. Check out this example with moment.js: http://dtab.io/sheets/560e138927b2d2da2c44fbce http://dtab.io/sheets/560e138927b2d2da2c44fbce
eloisius 11y ago
I'd love to see Jupyter (IPython Notebooks) capable of this kind of thing. It'd be awesome to be able to select a column of a Pandas DataFrame and apply a function to it.
- zcarter 11y ago
  Tongue in cheek? Alternatively, you should know about: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.DataFrame.apply.html http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas...
- baldfat 11y ago
  Well capable? Yes Pandas can do that but I think what you are talking about is you want a GUI tool? Everything about Pandas, IPython(Now Jupyter) and R (And the other data languages) are 100% about performing functions.
  - eloisius 11y ago
    Yeah, I mean more as a GUI enhancement. It might be outside the scope of Jupyter, but I think it'd be neat to be able to treat DataFrames like a spreadsheet. Personally, I'm comfortable writing Python, but I bet you'd see more adoption for non-programmer academics who still need to work with data.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      I doubt we will ever see the abandonment of spreadsheets LIKE WE SHOULD. Look at Open Refine you might really like it. http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a-spreadsheet-for-important-work-i-mean-it/ http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a...
      - analog31 11y ago
        I'm of the same mind about Excel, which is why I don't use it any more. I don't like anything where there are hidden layers of meaning that are easy to overlook. I like Jupyter because everything is right there in front of you. Another shortcoming of spreadsheets is that they don't solve what I consider to be the Fundamental Problem of Programming: How to keep your sanity when your project gets bigger than one screen or one page. Of course programmers have lots of ways to deal with this, by creating named abstractions, subroutines, and so forth. It's why we can write million line programs today. But how it's solved in Excel seems incredibly clumsy by comparison. Of course you can adopt the conventions of programming by using Visual Basic, but that seems to occur quite rarely.
angdis 11y ago
I like! One thing that I am hoping for however is some kind of notebook-like interface for doing small, ad-hoc data analysis projects. This looks fairly close to that. Mathematica pioneered "the computational notebook" concept, and now we have similar stuff with R/Rstudio, IPython/Jupyter, matlab, and jmp. Those are all really nice and powerful, but they're somewhat large in scope and very ambitious. It would be soooo cool to be able to just make notebooks that contain spreadsheets, related manipulation and analysis code and also text that can render to well-formatted html/pdf documents with really nice tables. This tool looks like it can get there... if it can develop the ability to render documents sort of like Knitr for R.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- calebm 11y ago
  I have been really curious about getting first-class interactive spreadsheet functionality in Jupyter (possibly by building a widget). I think it would be the ideal analysis platform.
- findjashua 11y ago
  if you're looking for something like an iPython notebook, check out tonicdev.com
- rol 11y ago
  Org mode[1] has some spreadsheet functionality which works fine as long as you don't use very large tables. Otherwise it gets a bit too slow. You can also use those spreadsheets as input for pieces of code so you perform some analysis on their data. -- [1] - http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Have you seen AirFlow before? I hooked a data scientist friend up with it dockerized, and he raves about it: http://nerds.airbnb.com/airflow/ http://nerds.airbnb.com/airflow/
  - 11y ago
markus2012 11y ago
bug? - (click) Clean text using regular expression - Load external lib: https://vega.github.io/datalib/datalib.min.js https://vega.github.io/datalib/datalib.min.js - Impossible (because there is no 'load external lib' functionality)
- sangd 11y ago
  You can go to Settings tab and load this file externally.
comrh 11y ago
Great UI. I wish it had some sort of import function that could take in the Excel formulas and not just CSV data though.
zaczac 11y ago
is there any angular 1.2 bindings?
nebulous1 11y ago
A couple of things I noticed: No editbox for the contents of the currently selected cell? (I have to double click to see the formula) One of the examples suggested I use dl.stdev(D2:D65). I think it actually meant D5, but in any case I noticed that it computed the stdev as if empty cells had zeroes in them, rather than ignore them which would be more the norm with spreadsheets. I do like the idea of being able to import random javascript, could be very handy. edit: also the drop down menu headings seem to stay highlighted when you click off them, but you probably knew that. 2nd edit: oh I see, it's if I click off them onto a blank part of the window
hliyan 11y ago
Quick idea: How about providing numeric cell referencing, jQuery-style: $(1, 2) // row 1, col 2 Like it's done here: https://github.com/hliyan/magpie/blob/master/lib/gasp.gs https://github.com/hliyan/magpie/blob/master/lib/gasp.gs
raymondgh 11y ago
This is great! A lot of useful spreadsheet functions are really esoteric and unintuitive. Would love to see this integrated with Google Sheets
polskibus 11y ago
It's nice to see handsontable put to another good use! What other open source libraries did you use?
akhilcacharya 11y ago
I know a project doing something similar at MIT for finance called AlphaSheets. https://founder.org/company/alphasheets https://founder.org/company/alphasheets
robochat 11y ago
This reminds me a lot of pyspread - http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ http://manns.github.io/pyspread/
misiti3780 11y ago
When i log in and view source I get back a little bit of json only {"_id":"560ee464ba6b14a61c74de66","name":"Untitled","data":null,"ownerId":"560ee461ba6b14a61c74de65","javascript":"","__v":0,"opened":"2015-10-02T20:09:09.119Z","modified":"2015-10-02T20:09:08.569Z","created":"2015-10-02T20:09:08.569Z","externalLibraries":[]} how are you doing that ?
- sangd 11y ago
  Try another refresh. What you're seeing is the sheet data only.
akavel 11y ago
The "About", "Documentation" etc. links at the bottom (footer) don't work for me unfortunately; is it just me, or are they so for others too?
- sangd 11y ago
  Sorry, those pages are not there yet. We're working to put in the those pages. We got excited and decided to show the meat first. We'll have done ready soon. If you'd like to contact us, go ahead and shoot us an email contact at dtab dot io

229 points by dnprock 11y ago

Looks neat, but currently getting a 503 error on one of the scripts in all the examples: https://rawgit.com/replit/jq-console/master/jqconsole.min.js https://rawgit.com/replit/jq-console/master/jqconsole.min.js

timdorr 11y ago
It should be on cdn.rawgit.com in production: https://rawgit.com/ https://rawgit.com/
dnprock 11y ago
Thanks. Forgot to change to cdn version. Fixed now.

sswezey 11y ago

This is already possibly with Google Spreadsheets albeit this is a much nicer interface.

niels_olson 11y ago
> albeit this is a much nicer interface And, if I understand correctly, this could be rolled into something like Jupyter. Which would be awesome!

SixSigma 11y ago

While I appreciate the idea.... Use Javascript to replace vba in excel http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-does-javascript-a-vba-developer-s-perspective.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/18/excel-... Use python to replace vba in excel http://xlwings.org/ http://xlwings.org/

iheartmemcache 11y ago
Yeah it's not really "new". Lotus Improv was doing this 25 years ago, for those of us old fogeys who remember. 1-2-3 was for the secretaries, Improv for the power users. Also, I know know of plenty of financial institutions that have mod'd Excel with Add-ins to the point where the Worksheet integrity is better than 95% of the RDBMS' I've worked with. Version controlled, full audit trails, access control lists, type validation... Hell out of the box, you can get an out of the box Excel + SQL Server BI to essentially make an off-the-cuff Line of Business app, completely sync'd, with a Silverlight front similar to (this)[http://www.infragistics.com/uploadedImages/Content/PRODUCTS/Silverlight_DV/Controls/Pivot_Grid/silverlight-pivot-grid-silverlight-business-intelligence-dv.jpg http://www.infragistics.com/uploadedImages/Content/PRODUCTS/...]
headcanon 11y ago
True, but having a feature isn't necessarily the same as having it front-and-center as part of the experience. Also, that JS API you have linked looks pretty verbose and clunky compared to OPs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

donpdonp 11y ago

while i dont have much of an opinion of js in a spreadsheet except "neat!", the website design and text is spot-on in that I understood in an instant what the project does! Kudos.

pikzen 11y ago

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

dang 11y ago
Please don't be mean and dismissive in response to new work. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- pikzen 11y ago
  I'm having trouble finding anything useful in a new, nonstandard spreadsheet software whose only interest is that you can use Javascript. But it's branded as a "new kind" of software, so it must be good :^)
  - dang 11y ago
    As the Show HN guidelines say: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is." But you also needn't trample over someone's freshly planted garden. Helpful criticism is fine. Asking a question is fine (a real question, not a gotcha one designed to make someone look bad); for example, one could ask "what do you mean when you say this is a new kind of spreadsheet?" Pointing out similarities to other work is fine. All we want to avoid is being dismissive. Since the line isn't obvious (especially to a million readers), simply err on the side of not being. On HN, new work doesn't need to be useful, just alive. One can't always predict what will turn out to be useful anyhow. Everybody showing new work deserves a minimal baseline of respect here. If you know more and have done more than someone else has, that's great. That's an opportunity to teach and to share, not put them down. Edit: since "new kind of spreadsheet" is arguably a bit baity we've changed to the HTML doc title.
    - Myrmornis 11y ago

OmarIsmail 11y ago

Nice work! I noticed that you're using a web-worker, does all the heavy lifting happen there and the main thread is used for purely rendering? I'm noticing some lag when I just press enter into a cell twice (once to get into edit, and then again to get out). Any idea what's going on there (I'm interested technically)?

j2kun 11y ago

Can I drop in any .js file I want that defines appropriate functions?

sangd 11y ago
Yes, you can. You can either paste the code in the Javascript tab, or add the hosted .js file in the Settings.
dnprock 11y ago
Yes, you can load any JS library to call. Check out this example with moment.js: http://dtab.io/sheets/560e138927b2d2da2c44fbce http://dtab.io/sheets/560e138927b2d2da2c44fbce

eloisius 11y ago

I'd love to see Jupyter (IPython Notebooks) capable of this kind of thing. It'd be awesome to be able to select a column of a Pandas DataFrame and apply a function to it.

zcarter 11y ago
Tongue in cheek? Alternatively, you should know about: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.DataFrame.apply.html http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas...
baldfat 11y ago
Well capable? Yes Pandas can do that but I think what you are talking about is you want a GUI tool? Everything about Pandas, IPython(Now Jupyter) and R (And the other data languages) are 100% about performing functions.
- eloisius 11y ago
  Yeah, I mean more as a GUI enhancement. It might be outside the scope of Jupyter, but I think it'd be neat to be able to treat DataFrames like a spreadsheet. Personally, I'm comfortable writing Python, but I bet you'd see more adoption for non-programmer academics who still need to work with data.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I doubt we will ever see the abandonment of spreadsheets LIKE WE SHOULD. Look at Open Refine you might really like it. http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a-spreadsheet-for-important-work-i-mean-it/ http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a...
    - analog31 11y ago
      I'm of the same mind about Excel, which is why I don't use it any more. I don't like anything where there are hidden layers of meaning that are easy to overlook. I like Jupyter because everything is right there in front of you. Another shortcoming of spreadsheets is that they don't solve what I consider to be the Fundamental Problem of Programming: How to keep your sanity when your project gets bigger than one screen or one page. Of course programmers have lots of ways to deal with this, by creating named abstractions, subroutines, and so forth. It's why we can write million line programs today. But how it's solved in Excel seems incredibly clumsy by comparison. Of course you can adopt the conventions of programming by using Visual Basic, but that seems to occur quite rarely.

angdis 11y ago

I like! One thing that I am hoping for however is some kind of notebook-like interface for doing small, ad-hoc data analysis projects. This looks fairly close to that. Mathematica pioneered "the computational notebook" concept, and now we have similar stuff with R/Rstudio, IPython/Jupyter, matlab, and jmp. Those are all really nice and powerful, but they're somewhat large in scope and very ambitious. It would be soooo cool to be able to just make notebooks that contain spreadsheets, related manipulation and analysis code and also text that can render to well-formatted html/pdf documents with really nice tables. This tool looks like it can get there... if it can develop the ability to render documents sort of like Knitr for R.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
calebm 11y ago
I have been really curious about getting first-class interactive spreadsheet functionality in Jupyter (possibly by building a widget). I think it would be the ideal analysis platform.
findjashua 11y ago
if you're looking for something like an iPython notebook, check out tonicdev.com
rol 11y ago
Org mode[1] has some spreadsheet functionality which works fine as long as you don't use very large tables. Otherwise it gets a bit too slow. You can also use those spreadsheets as input for pieces of code so you perform some analysis on their data. -- [1] - http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Have you seen AirFlow before? I hooked a data scientist friend up with it dockerized, and he raves about it: http://nerds.airbnb.com/airflow/ http://nerds.airbnb.com/airflow/
- 11y ago

markus2012 11y ago

bug? - (click) Clean text using regular expression - Load external lib: https://vega.github.io/datalib/datalib.min.js https://vega.github.io/datalib/datalib.min.js - Impossible (because there is no 'load external lib' functionality)

sangd 11y ago
You can go to Settings tab and load this file externally.

comrh 11y ago

Great UI. I wish it had some sort of import function that could take in the Excel formulas and not just CSV data though.

zaczac 11y ago

is there any angular 1.2 bindings?

nebulous1 11y ago

A couple of things I noticed: No editbox for the contents of the currently selected cell? (I have to double click to see the formula) One of the examples suggested I use dl.stdev(D2:D65). I think it actually meant D5, but in any case I noticed that it computed the stdev as if empty cells had zeroes in them, rather than ignore them which would be more the norm with spreadsheets. I do like the idea of being able to import random javascript, could be very handy. edit: also the drop down menu headings seem to stay highlighted when you click off them, but you probably knew that. 2nd edit: oh I see, it's if I click off them onto a blank part of the window

hliyan 11y ago

Quick idea: How about providing numeric cell referencing, jQuery-style: $(1, 2) // row 1, col 2 Like it's done here: https://github.com/hliyan/magpie/blob/master/lib/gasp.gs https://github.com/hliyan/magpie/blob/master/lib/gasp.gs

raymondgh 11y ago

This is great! A lot of useful spreadsheet functions are really esoteric and unintuitive. Would love to see this integrated with Google Sheets

polskibus 11y ago

It's nice to see handsontable put to another good use! What other open source libraries did you use?

akhilcacharya 11y ago

I know a project doing something similar at MIT for finance called AlphaSheets. https://founder.org/company/alphasheets https://founder.org/company/alphasheets

robochat 11y ago

This reminds me a lot of pyspread - http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ http://manns.github.io/pyspread/

misiti3780 11y ago

When i log in and view source I get back a little bit of json only {"_id":"560ee464ba6b14a61c74de66","name":"Untitled","data":null,"ownerId":"560ee461ba6b14a61c74de65","javascript":"","__v":0,"opened":"2015-10-02T20:09:09.119Z","modified":"2015-10-02T20:09:08.569Z","created":"2015-10-02T20:09:08.569Z","externalLibraries":[]} how are you doing that ?

sangd 11y ago
Try another refresh. What you're seeing is the sheet data only.

akavel 11y ago

The "About", "Documentation" etc. links at the bottom (footer) don't work for me unfortunately; is it just me, or are they so for others too?

sangd 11y ago
Sorry, those pages are not there yet. We're working to put in the those pages. We got excited and decided to show the meat first. We'll have done ready soon. If you'd like to contact us, go ahead and shoot us an email contact at dtab dot io