12 ms·

Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

274 points by gamegoblin 3y ago

elforce002 3y ago
Interesting concept. Are you planning on offering an interactive embedding alternative (add the spreadsheet to an existing app) soon?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We have definitely gotten requests to embed spreadsheets in webpages (e.g. as dashboards, etc), it's on the roadmap
  - elforce002 3y ago
    Nice. Is there a way to access the roadmap or to be on the loop regarding new features?
    - gamegoblin 3y ago
      Email us at contact[at]rowzero.io, we should probably set up some sort of newsletter now that we are launched
breckognize 3y ago
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 choice, so 3 years ago I started working on it. Today we're launching Row Zero. Row Zero looks and feels like Excel and Google Sheets, but 100-1000x faster. You can easily import gigabytes of CSV, JSONL, and Parquet files or connect directly to Snowflake, Redshift, Postgres, and S3. We also support Python natively. You can call Python functions that return pandas data frames and manipulate the results directly in the spreadsheet. Under the hood, Row Zero is a high-performance columnar engine written in Rust. Running in AWS lets us scale compute up and down and import quickly from S3 and Snowflake. When you open a workbook, we place it in the AWS region closest to you so it feels as snappy as a desktop application. The app is built by 5 ex-principal engineers from Amazon S3, Tableau, and Airtable. We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3. We've been in beta for a year. Use us to refine big CSVs, build complex financial models, create dashboards, and share large data sets. We're also a killer Snowflake/Postgres client. Give us a try and let us know what you think.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Excel 2010 is several times faster than the latest Excel versions. What are the performance metrics compared to Excel 2010?
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    It varies depending on what you are doing, but is probably 100x faster on average. Some things are literally 10000x faster because we are internally using algorithms with better asymptotic complexity than Excel, but there are a few edge cases where we are maybe only 10x faster (but we are always working to improve that — half my job is just analyzing flame graphs and grinding out perf improvements)
  - breckognize 3y ago
    When we claim 100x faster than desktop Excel, we're looking at supported row counts, import speeds from Snowflake, and time to drag large XLOOKUPs. We'll do a deep dive on performance in another blog post next week. Stay tuned!
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Thanks, what are the lower bound numbers you're willing to guarantee in writing? (assuming identical systems) I think putting that on the site would save business customers a lot of evaluation time.
- codegeek 3y ago
  "We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.
  - Kluggy 3y ago
    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-to-take-on-tech-giants-with-worlds-fastest-spreadsheet/ https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-... Personally I don’t like this sort of puffery in funding slides nor announcements.
gamegoblin 3y ago
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!
- orliesaurus 3y ago
  Tell us about the stack you're using to build this. Also the biggest tech challenges you've faced and solved? But most importantly, does your family still use Google Spreadsheets?
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    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 where cells depend on other cells down to some root cells. There are a TON of fascinating graph theory algorithms you can bring to bear here. Some of the hardest problems I have ever worked on. My whiteboard looks like an insane person's with crazy arrows between cells and stuff. 3. Sometimes there really is no magic bullet and you just have to run benchmark, get flamegraph, chip away 3%, repeat, do that 100 times and you are very fast. Gotta grind.
    - sidcool 3y ago
      How is the data modelled and persisted? What database and how is conflict handled? CRDT?
      - gamegoblin 3y ago
        We use Apache Arrow data format, so it's fairly columnar. We have built some custom layers on top of Arrow as well to handle some fancier data types. For storage and orchestration we use S3 and Dynamo. Yes exactly, we use CRDTs for multiplayer stuff.
wesm 3y ago
I was especially excited to learn that RZ is built on Apache Arrow internally, which makes it easy to integrate with other Arrow-based applications and the emerging "Composable Data Stack". Really exciting stuff, they're just getting started!
wardtb 3y ago
I've been using this for a few months and from a user perspective, it feels really fast and intuitive.
chatmasta 3y ago
This looks really promising, and I love that you make a demo available with no account. But I don't have time to track down some sample data to test it with. I'm guessing this post is going to the front of HN. If you've got some sample data, you should put it into the demo sheet ASAP. Or at the very least, provide some links to s3 files the user can manually add to test it themselves.
- breckognize 3y ago
  We've got some sample data sets in S3 if you go to Data > Import from Amazon S3. The bucket rowzero-public-datasets has some neat ones.
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    Oh, cool! I saw that menu option but I didn't click it since I assumed I'd have to enter some details. I'll check it out. Thanks :)
jasongill 3y ago
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 Excel. But maybe they could finally be convinced to stop complaining aboutrequesting huge files with something like this...
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We try really hard to be Excel-compatible with all our formulas and hotkeys, etc. If there is a formula or hotkey we are missing, let us know and we will add it (usually with < 24 hour turnaround time!) The use-case you describe is exactly what we built it for. There are a lot of people who have data that is no longer human-scale and won't fit into Excel, but they still want to use their Excel skills. We love Excel and spreadsheets, but when working at AWS we found we just had too much data to fit into it.
  - samstave 3y ago
    This is just a fun FYI ; This is 8 years old! (as of yesterday!!) but its pretty amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6MiJ29X_OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDc... Its Martin Skreli (yes that one) -- but see how fast this guy is with excel... this is what I imagine when I think of excel power users... (But also, he does a lesson in DD on investing and doing calcs in Excel - so aside from awesome Excel input, there is good investing info here - recall this was the guy that bought a medical company and immediately raised the price 7,000% or some such (he then bought the Wu Tang Album whilst imprisoned)
- sbensu 3y ago
  I've found that while people don't want to change out of Excel they are forced to by the size of new files. The more data is generated by computers, the less likely it is to fit in Excel I imagine many professions won't be able to use Excel in 10 years based on this trend.
skadamat 3y ago
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.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Are any of these multi-dimensional? Still looking for a replacement Lotus Improv (can't justify Quantrix Financial).
  - breckognize 3y ago
    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.
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      I need something which allows me to interactively re-arrange the date on-the-fly --- if you've never worked w/ Improv it's hard to express. There was the beginnings of an opensource implementation, Flexisheet, or see: https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadsheets-done-right-1991/ https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv...
- ozim 3y ago
  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.
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    Excel is really great if you don't have too much data. We love Excel! But we just had too much data for it, so we built the solution we wanted. We can handle 100x more data than Excel (online or desktop), Google Sheets, etc.
eichin 3y ago
https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/ 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.)
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  I have a demo I will post soon that runs MNIST in Row Zero, we should be able to handle all of GPT2 without too much trouble, probably a lot faster than Excel, we may have to try it!
  - jcuenod 3y ago
    This deserves its own Show HN!
    - gamegoblin 3y ago
      I will post it next week! It's very fun to play with. Also a good demo of Row Zero's templating capability — I can make a template so when you click the link, you get your own copy you can mutate and play with.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  A similarly important benchmark is DOOM fps: https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw?si=YNuNBDS7ti8gmpqc https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw?si=YNuNBDS7ti8gmpqc
airstrike 3y ago
I'm a bit obsessed about spreadsheets and as someone who's building something similar (but not identical), it feels great to see all these next-gen spreadsheets on HN. Spreadsheets are hard to do and even harder to do right, so congrats on launching—although given your backgrounds I don't think you ever lacked the manpower to let this be a technical challenge ;-) My initial reaction: * It does feel pretty fast * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX * the data tables / formula tables are a solid idea * no self-hosting outside of Enterprise makes switching to this harder than it ought to be * limiting the free plan to 3 sheets feels like a strange decision
- pimlottc 3y ago
  > * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX What do you mean by this? Inferior to a standalone app? Inferior to some other design in general?
  - airstrike 3y ago
    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
    - dustingetz 3y ago
      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!
      - airstrike 3y ago
        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
nickjj 3y ago
At the time of this comment (edit: since this comment, they addressed this, check the replies), on your pricing page you have "SOC 2 Type II Security Compliance" not being checked off on the free tier but it's checked in the others. The same thing applies to "HIPAA Compliant and BAA" except this isn't enabled for free and pro plans. What makes the free tier different here? Are you storing free data in a different area with many less restrictions on who has access to it? How do I know what I upload is safe from being analyzed or sold? Are you using this data to train any data models but only in the free / pro tiers that aren't SOC 2 or HIPAA compliant?
- otterley 3y ago
  IME working at SaaS providers in my past, there's no practical difference in the underlying implementation; it's market segmentation. It's a great way to help SaaS providers attract more revenue. Customers who care about these compliance regimes are the target cohort and are more likely to pay for the ticked box.
- breckognize 3y ago
  There's no difference in how data is stored or processed between the tiers. We updated our pricing page to address the confusion. We only provide the SOC 2 report or BAA for Business accounts.
  - nickjj 3y ago
    Thanks, I do see a difference now. Both compliance types are checked on the free tier. Can you please answer the question about how our data is viewed and or used internally?
    - breckognize 3y ago
      We do not use customer data. From https://rowzero.io/security https://rowzero.io/security: "Row Zero does not use customer data for any purpose."
- tptacek 3y ago
otterley 3y ago
Flagging for title change as it currently reads like a marketing boast.
pid-1 3y ago
> SSO > Contact US Yeah no thanks.
strongpigeon 3y ago
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 wondered what that "Record Macro" button did. I've heard that same story personally from so many users, about how they learned to code by hitting "Record Macro", doing something and looking at the resulting code. Their macro then grows and grows and ends up powering the entire business, but becomes an unmaintainable mess. If you add the ability to record macros and maybe a VBA -> Python cross compiler, that would probably be killer for a lot of people. Though honestly, I've seen some stuff in VBA that's probably best left alone (e.g.: a self-rewriting VBA macro). That being said, I'm sure your biggest hurdles are going to be cultural rather than technical. Excel is just so ingrained in so many business. But I genuinely wish you best of luck and am rooting for y'all!
- padjo 3y ago
  VBA macros were my route from teenager in a warehouse to a 20+ year career in software development
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro
  - strongpigeon 3y ago
    From what I remember (that was almost almost 10 years ago, so a bit foggy now), it was some finance/trading people (the crazier stuff is always from finance people) that were doing some optimization work and found they had better performance by putting back the values in the macro itself and rerunning it. Something to that effect. (Or was it for versioning? I forgot the details honestly) I think they were using file system calls with some tools to rewrite the file directly. But IIRC it's possible to do it just via the API.
CiTyBear 3y ago
Looks really nice. Too bad you take businesses into hostage regarding the SSO. This is even one one the main argument in your Enterprise plan. I know this is common behavior but I find it sad to have such an important security feature proposed only on latest plan. Hope this trend will end soon.
serjester 3y ago
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.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  It's very high on the list for post-launch feature additions Copilot for formulas, auto-write python, etc, it'll all land soon!
sidcool 3y ago
Congrats! This looks awesome. I would love to get a sneak peek of the underlying architecture. It takes a lot of confidence to say faster than Google spreadsheets by a 1000x!
fakedang 3y ago
Make this a desktop app, and I'm sure you'll have a bunch of finance nerds like me waiting in line. This looks really well built.
- breckognize 3y ago
  Can you reach out to breck at rowzero.io? We've heard this a few times and would love to learn more about your use case.
polskibus 3y ago
Can you share performance comparisons to duckdb and clickhouse?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We have not tried clickhouse, but are probably comparable to DuckDB. DuckDB is also backed by Apache Arrow the same as us, but is targeting database users, whereas we are targeting spreadsheet users. They are very complementary.
csjh 3y ago
Is the number crunching running fully locally via WASM? Or is it more of a websocket pushing commands thru to the backend type setup? I'm guessing the latter because of how fast the S3 import was but the former would be super interesting as well. Great demo!
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  All the compute happens in the cloud, you're exactly right about the websocket pushing commands.
spacehunt 3y ago
Is there a way to push data into it, rather than have it pull data from data sources? I have some use cases where users want <3s latency from source data updates to the display being refreshed. For reference, I managed to get to ~10s using Google Sheets' API.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  Not yet, but we could add that feature. Feel free to contact us at contact[at]rowzero.io so we can learn more about your use case. We could also maybe do some kind of webhook situation? Lots of options.
imaurer 3y ago
R2 support for egress $$ reasons?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We will add R2 support soon!
nwhnwh 3y ago
Can this be used as a 3rd-party lib?
prometheus76 3y ago
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?
- breckognize 3y ago
  The spreadsheet DAG is derived from the formulas. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding!
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  - prometheus76 3y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU
7thaccount 3y ago
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.
- breckognize 3y ago
  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.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    True, but then you have private data on the cloud which a lot of folks either aren't happy with or in some cases maybe can't do.
runningamok 3y ago
Congrats! As a sheets user I appreciate that rows are seamlessly added as you scroll past the initial sheet size.
- billylitt 3y ago
  As much as I love clicking "Add 1000 more rows", we thought continuous scroll might be appreciated :)
mring33621 3y ago
1) looks great so far 2) row zero people seem awesome Wishing you all the best! Pssst -- seems like a lot of useful apps/screens can be modeled as forms on top of spreadsheets...
laborcontract 3y ago
I'm an Excel power(max?)(ultra!?) user and the only thing I want from an alternative to microsoft word on windows is a drop in replacement to their alt shortcuts. Those are the air that I breathe when using Excel and fast isn't fast if you're working slow.
- billylitt 3y ago
  Row Zero frontend dev here. Totally understand where you're coming from; we've heard this request from others and are interested in exploring a seamless solution for `alt` reliant power users like yourself. Drop me an email if you'd be interested in user-testing a solution! billy[at]rowzero.io
m1117 3y ago
But then I have to work faster
amelius 3y ago
Never understood spreadsheets. Why would you assume data fits in a 2d-array? And why put heterogenous data in that 2d-array in blocks at different x,y offsets? The future is tensors ;)
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We have native dataframe support that encourages homogenous types, but we also want to meet Excel users where they are! Probably half the world's economy runs on Excel, it's the world's most popular programming language :)
fallingsprings 3y ago
Out of curiosity, do you support/have plans to support the broader set of Excel shortcuts that reference the ribbon? (Alt + <Key Sequence> shortcuts). Lots of excel power users more or less exclusively use the keyboard to navigate, and so have muscle memory for almost everything they do, including more niche operations (Insert Line Chart = Alt N N 1, or Change Column Width = Alt H O W). Will be a very hard sell to banks/other financial services corps if you can't match that aspect of excel. (They will probably also want local files and a native app).
- deleted 3y ago
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- billylitt 3y ago
  Good question - we've heard this feedback before and have some ideas for how to bake alt-shortcuts into the app for the muscle memory crowd. So, not yet, but its very much on our radar.
cha42 3y ago
Do you have any simd-optim in parsing all those large files ? I have read that you write some of your own parser for perf boost. (I am one of the author of https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath)
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  No SIMD in the parser path... yet... :) The main win from writing our own custom parser is writing directly into the final in-memory format from the parse stream without any intermediate allocations or data movement. Awesome project! Adding it to my list of things we may plug into in the future.
  - cha42 3y ago
    Sealable spreadsheet is also awesome ! Congrats for the delivery.
sa46 3y ago
Is the pricing per user? $15/mo for an entire org sounds too good to be true.
- NickBEnd 3y ago
  The business pricing is $15 per user per month. We will clarify that on the pricing page.
jkaptur 3y ago
Quick bug report: I set A0 and A1 to 1, then set A2 =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1. As expected, A2 evaluated to 4. Then I right-clicked on the 1 row header and inserted 1 row above. Expected: A3 should become =SUM(A0:A2)+A0+A2 and evaluate to 4 Actual: A3 becomes =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A2 and remains 4 until it is edited, at which point it evaluates to 3.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  I just tested in Excel and Google Sheets and our behavior matches them here, unless I am misunderstanding the repro steps. For me, A3 becomes =SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 and remains 4 as it should be. The action I am taking: A0=1 A1=1 A2=SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1 (evaluates to 4) Right click A0 and click "insert row above" Now I have: A0=empty A1=1 A2=1 A3=SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 (evaluates to 4) Thank you for trying to find edge cases! I have put literally hundreds of hours into stuff like this. Let me know if you have different repro steps.
  - jkaptur 3y ago
    > Right click A0 and click "insert row above" Instead, right click A1 and click "insert row above". Google Sheets (and, I'm 99.99% sure, Excel) adjust the range inside the SUM to be three rows high. I've put quite some time into this sort of thing too :)
    - gamegoblin 3y ago
      Didn't know who I was talking to, looked you up now, amazing ;) Thanks a lot for the bug report. We actually used to implement the range-extension logic in Excel/Sheets but removed it during a cut-paste refactor due to the complexity (I'm sure you know...) and resolved to add it back when someone asked for it. I actually found edge cases where Sheets and Excel don't do range extension logic the same way. So we don't do the range extension for now, but the 4 not getting recomputed to 3 is definitely a bug, will fix!
      - emeril 3y ago
free_bip 3y ago
This would be a heck of a lot cooler if it was a local-first desktop application. It's still cool mind you, but it could have been a heck of a lot _more_ cool.
- runningamok 3y ago
  Agreed. Even better if it was a local-first web application.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We have the capability to run it as a desktop app. How much do you think we should charge for it, and how do you think we should do support, feature additions, etc? We are open to the idea.
xiasongh 3y ago
Are you guys using polars or Data Fusion for any computations?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We use Apache Arrow which is what Data Fusion and Polars also use
nojvek 3y ago
One of the powers of excel is that it is your data on your machine. You can work fully offline, no SaaS monthly crap. Row zero is nice, don’t get me wrong. But the whole idea of me giving them gigabytes of data, or the creds to production database is a big no no. If a 3rd party has your creds, they will eventually get hacked.
novoreorx 3y ago
Not trying to relate with AI, GPT, or LLM in a spreadsheet product is the best thing to me, kudos!
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  We will add a little tasteful AI stuff later, but it's not the highest priority. Top priority is big data and fast data. AI is relatively easy to layer on later.
  - novoreorx 3y ago
    I agree, AI should not be the central focus, but when appropriately integrated, it can be highly beneficial.
crashabr 3y ago
My current issue with Google Sheets is that it gets really slow when I connect tries to load data from dozens of sheets into a single one using multiple importrange. Does your solution work better for this use case?
- billylitt 3y ago
  This use case is where we shine. Sheets is a great tool, but its performance is limited by your browser's memory, whereas Row Zero compute is happening in the cloud. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
matrix1010 3y ago
For people who want to process their XLSX/CSV files locally and want some easy to use ETL tool, maybe take a look Tablesmith: https://tablesmith.io/ https://tablesmith.io/, it's free to use.
voltaireodactyl 3y ago
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?
- JoiDegn 3y ago
  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.
  - voltaireodactyl 3y ago
    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.
- breckognize 3y ago
  I don't know enough about QuickBooks to say we can replace it. But we do have enterprise accounting teams using us to pivot millions of rows of general ledger data. So if you're looking to (e.g.) create summaries of categorized expenses, we're great for that. Where are you importing your financial data from?
phantarch 3y ago
Congrats Row Zero team on the launch! Excited to see all the cool ways people will think to use the product :)
aembleton 3y ago
I could import matplotlib but I couldn't work out how to display the output. I guess that this library is supported otherwise I wouldn't be able to import it. How do I display it's output. This is the function I'm trying to run: def plot(lat,lng): plt.scatter(x=lng, y=lat) plt.show();
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  Adding image support from Python is on our roadmap
wcallahan 3y ago
If our data source is Postgres, can edits/updates be sent directly back to Postgres? If the import is one-way right now, are there any plans to make the above possible?

274 points by gamegoblin 3y ago

Interesting concept. Are you planning on offering an interactive embedding alternative (add the spreadsheet to an existing app) soon?

gamegoblin 3y ago
We have definitely gotten requests to embed spreadsheets in webpages (e.g. as dashboards, etc), it's on the roadmap
- elforce002 3y ago
  Nice. Is there a way to access the roadmap or to be on the loop regarding new features?
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    Email us at contact[at]rowzero.io, we should probably set up some sort of newsletter now that we are launched

breckognize 3y ago

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 choice, so 3 years ago I started working on it. Today we're launching Row Zero. Row Zero looks and feels like Excel and Google Sheets, but 100-1000x faster. You can easily import gigabytes of CSV, JSONL, and Parquet files or connect directly to Snowflake, Redshift, Postgres, and S3. We also support Python natively. You can call Python functions that return pandas data frames and manipulate the results directly in the spreadsheet. Under the hood, Row Zero is a high-performance columnar engine written in Rust. Running in AWS lets us scale compute up and down and import quickly from S3 and Snowflake. When you open a workbook, we place it in the AWS region closest to you so it feels as snappy as a desktop application. The app is built by 5 ex-principal engineers from Amazon S3, Tableau, and Airtable. We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3. We've been in beta for a year. Use us to refine big CSVs, build complex financial models, create dashboards, and share large data sets. We're also a killer Snowflake/Postgres client. Give us a try and let us know what you think.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Excel 2010 is several times faster than the latest Excel versions. What are the performance metrics compared to Excel 2010?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  It varies depending on what you are doing, but is probably 100x faster on average. Some things are literally 10000x faster because we are internally using algorithms with better asymptotic complexity than Excel, but there are a few edge cases where we are maybe only 10x faster (but we are always working to improve that — half my job is just analyzing flame graphs and grinding out perf improvements)
- breckognize 3y ago
  When we claim 100x faster than desktop Excel, we're looking at supported row counts, import speeds from Snowflake, and time to drag large XLOOKUPs. We'll do a deep dive on performance in another blog post next week. Stay tuned!
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Thanks, what are the lower bound numbers you're willing to guarantee in writing? (assuming identical systems) I think putting that on the site would save business customers a lot of evaluation time.
codegeek 3y ago
"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.
- Kluggy 3y ago
  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-to-take-on-tech-giants-with-worlds-fastest-spreadsheet/ https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-... Personally I don’t like this sort of puffery in funding slides nor announcements.

gamegoblin 3y ago

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!

orliesaurus 3y ago
Tell us about the stack you're using to build this. Also the biggest tech challenges you've faced and solved? But most importantly, does your family still use Google Spreadsheets?
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  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 where cells depend on other cells down to some root cells. There are a TON of fascinating graph theory algorithms you can bring to bear here. Some of the hardest problems I have ever worked on. My whiteboard looks like an insane person's with crazy arrows between cells and stuff. 3. Sometimes there really is no magic bullet and you just have to run benchmark, get flamegraph, chip away 3%, repeat, do that 100 times and you are very fast. Gotta grind.
  - sidcool 3y ago
    How is the data modelled and persisted? What database and how is conflict handled? CRDT?
    - gamegoblin 3y ago
      We use Apache Arrow data format, so it's fairly columnar. We have built some custom layers on top of Arrow as well to handle some fancier data types. For storage and orchestration we use S3 and Dynamo. Yes exactly, we use CRDTs for multiplayer stuff.

wesm 3y ago

I was especially excited to learn that RZ is built on Apache Arrow internally, which makes it easy to integrate with other Arrow-based applications and the emerging "Composable Data Stack". Really exciting stuff, they're just getting started!

wardtb 3y ago

I've been using this for a few months and from a user perspective, it feels really fast and intuitive.

chatmasta 3y ago

This looks really promising, and I love that you make a demo available with no account. But I don't have time to track down some sample data to test it with. I'm guessing this post is going to the front of HN. If you've got some sample data, you should put it into the demo sheet ASAP. Or at the very least, provide some links to s3 files the user can manually add to test it themselves.

breckognize 3y ago
We've got some sample data sets in S3 if you go to Data > Import from Amazon S3. The bucket rowzero-public-datasets has some neat ones.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Oh, cool! I saw that menu option but I didn't click it since I assumed I'd have to enter some details. I'll check it out. Thanks :)

jasongill 3y ago

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 Excel. But maybe they could finally be convinced to stop complaining aboutrequesting huge files with something like this...

gamegoblin 3y ago
We try really hard to be Excel-compatible with all our formulas and hotkeys, etc. If there is a formula or hotkey we are missing, let us know and we will add it (usually with < 24 hour turnaround time!) The use-case you describe is exactly what we built it for. There are a lot of people who have data that is no longer human-scale and won't fit into Excel, but they still want to use their Excel skills. We love Excel and spreadsheets, but when working at AWS we found we just had too much data to fit into it.
- samstave 3y ago
  This is just a fun FYI ; This is 8 years old! (as of yesterday!!) but its pretty amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6MiJ29X_OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDc... Its Martin Skreli (yes that one) -- but see how fast this guy is with excel... this is what I imagine when I think of excel power users... (But also, he does a lesson in DD on investing and doing calcs in Excel - so aside from awesome Excel input, there is good investing info here - recall this was the guy that bought a medical company and immediately raised the price 7,000% or some such (he then bought the Wu Tang Album whilst imprisoned)
sbensu 3y ago
I've found that while people don't want to change out of Excel they are forced to by the size of new files. The more data is generated by computers, the less likely it is to fit in Excel I imagine many professions won't be able to use Excel in 10 years based on this trend.

skadamat 3y ago

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.

WillAdams 3y ago
Are any of these multi-dimensional? Still looking for a replacement Lotus Improv (can't justify Quantrix Financial).
- breckognize 3y ago
  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.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    I need something which allows me to interactively re-arrange the date on-the-fly --- if you've never worked w/ Improv it's hard to express. There was the beginnings of an opensource implementation, Flexisheet, or see: https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadsheets-done-right-1991/ https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv...
ozim 3y ago
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.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  Excel is really great if you don't have too much data. We love Excel! But we just had too much data for it, so we built the solution we wanted. We can handle 100x more data than Excel (online or desktop), Google Sheets, etc.

eichin 3y ago

https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/ 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.)

gamegoblin 3y ago
I have a demo I will post soon that runs MNIST in Row Zero, we should be able to handle all of GPT2 without too much trouble, probably a lot faster than Excel, we may have to try it!
- jcuenod 3y ago
  This deserves its own Show HN!
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    I will post it next week! It's very fun to play with. Also a good demo of Row Zero's templating capability — I can make a template so when you click the link, you get your own copy you can mutate and play with.
sdenton4 3y ago
A similarly important benchmark is DOOM fps: https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw?si=YNuNBDS7ti8gmpqc https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw?si=YNuNBDS7ti8gmpqc

airstrike 3y ago

I'm a bit obsessed about spreadsheets and as someone who's building something similar (but not identical), it feels great to see all these next-gen spreadsheets on HN. Spreadsheets are hard to do and even harder to do right, so congrats on launching—although given your backgrounds I don't think you ever lacked the manpower to let this be a technical challenge ;-) My initial reaction: * It does feel pretty fast * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX * the data tables / formula tables are a solid idea * no self-hosting outside of Enterprise makes switching to this harder than it ought to be * limiting the free plan to 3 sheets feels like a strange decision

pimlottc 3y ago
> * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX What do you mean by this? Inferior to a standalone app? Inferior to some other design in general?
- airstrike 3y ago
  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
  - dustingetz 3y ago
    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!
    - airstrike 3y ago
      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

nickjj 3y ago

At the time of this comment (edit: since this comment, they addressed this, check the replies), on your pricing page you have "SOC 2 Type II Security Compliance" not being checked off on the free tier but it's checked in the others. The same thing applies to "HIPAA Compliant and BAA" except this isn't enabled for free and pro plans. What makes the free tier different here? Are you storing free data in a different area with many less restrictions on who has access to it? How do I know what I upload is safe from being analyzed or sold? Are you using this data to train any data models but only in the free / pro tiers that aren't SOC 2 or HIPAA compliant?

otterley 3y ago
IME working at SaaS providers in my past, there's no practical difference in the underlying implementation; it's market segmentation. It's a great way to help SaaS providers attract more revenue. Customers who care about these compliance regimes are the target cohort and are more likely to pay for the ticked box.
breckognize 3y ago
There's no difference in how data is stored or processed between the tiers. We updated our pricing page to address the confusion. We only provide the SOC 2 report or BAA for Business accounts.
- nickjj 3y ago
  Thanks, I do see a difference now. Both compliance types are checked on the free tier. Can you please answer the question about how our data is viewed and or used internally?
  - breckognize 3y ago
    We do not use customer data. From https://rowzero.io/security https://rowzero.io/security: "Row Zero does not use customer data for any purpose."
tptacek 3y ago

otterley 3y ago

Flagging for title change as it currently reads like a marketing boast.

pid-1 3y ago

> SSO > Contact US Yeah no thanks.

strongpigeon 3y ago

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 wondered what that "Record Macro" button did. I've heard that same story personally from so many users, about how they learned to code by hitting "Record Macro", doing something and looking at the resulting code. Their macro then grows and grows and ends up powering the entire business, but becomes an unmaintainable mess. If you add the ability to record macros and maybe a VBA -> Python cross compiler, that would probably be killer for a lot of people. Though honestly, I've seen some stuff in VBA that's probably best left alone (e.g.: a self-rewriting VBA macro). That being said, I'm sure your biggest hurdles are going to be cultural rather than technical. Excel is just so ingrained in so many business. But I genuinely wish you best of luck and am rooting for y'all!

padjo 3y ago
VBA macros were my route from teenager in a warehouse to a 20+ year career in software development
gamegoblin 3y ago
I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro
- strongpigeon 3y ago
  From what I remember (that was almost almost 10 years ago, so a bit foggy now), it was some finance/trading people (the crazier stuff is always from finance people) that were doing some optimization work and found they had better performance by putting back the values in the macro itself and rerunning it. Something to that effect. (Or was it for versioning? I forgot the details honestly) I think they were using file system calls with some tools to rewrite the file directly. But IIRC it's possible to do it just via the API.

CiTyBear 3y ago

Looks really nice. Too bad you take businesses into hostage regarding the SSO. This is even one one the main argument in your Enterprise plan. I know this is common behavior but I find it sad to have such an important security feature proposed only on latest plan. Hope this trend will end soon.

serjester 3y ago

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.

gamegoblin 3y ago
It's very high on the list for post-launch feature additions Copilot for formulas, auto-write python, etc, it'll all land soon!

sidcool 3y ago

Congrats! This looks awesome. I would love to get a sneak peek of the underlying architecture. It takes a lot of confidence to say faster than Google spreadsheets by a 1000x!

fakedang 3y ago

Make this a desktop app, and I'm sure you'll have a bunch of finance nerds like me waiting in line. This looks really well built.

breckognize 3y ago
Can you reach out to breck at rowzero.io? We've heard this a few times and would love to learn more about your use case.

polskibus 3y ago

Can you share performance comparisons to duckdb and clickhouse?

gamegoblin 3y ago
We have not tried clickhouse, but are probably comparable to DuckDB. DuckDB is also backed by Apache Arrow the same as us, but is targeting database users, whereas we are targeting spreadsheet users. They are very complementary.

csjh 3y ago

Is the number crunching running fully locally via WASM? Or is it more of a websocket pushing commands thru to the backend type setup? I'm guessing the latter because of how fast the S3 import was but the former would be super interesting as well. Great demo!

gamegoblin 3y ago
All the compute happens in the cloud, you're exactly right about the websocket pushing commands.

spacehunt 3y ago

Is there a way to push data into it, rather than have it pull data from data sources? I have some use cases where users want <3s latency from source data updates to the display being refreshed. For reference, I managed to get to ~10s using Google Sheets' API.

gamegoblin 3y ago
Not yet, but we could add that feature. Feel free to contact us at contact[at]rowzero.io so we can learn more about your use case. We could also maybe do some kind of webhook situation? Lots of options.

imaurer 3y ago

R2 support for egress $$ reasons?

gamegoblin 3y ago
We will add R2 support soon!

nwhnwh 3y ago

Can this be used as a 3rd-party lib?

prometheus76 3y ago

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?

breckognize 3y ago
The spreadsheet DAG is derived from the formulas. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding!
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- prometheus76 3y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU

7thaccount 3y ago

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.

breckognize 3y ago
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.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  True, but then you have private data on the cloud which a lot of folks either aren't happy with or in some cases maybe can't do.

runningamok 3y ago

Congrats! As a sheets user I appreciate that rows are seamlessly added as you scroll past the initial sheet size.

billylitt 3y ago
As much as I love clicking "Add 1000 more rows", we thought continuous scroll might be appreciated :)

mring33621 3y ago

1) looks great so far 2) row zero people seem awesome Wishing you all the best! Pssst -- seems like a lot of useful apps/screens can be modeled as forms on top of spreadsheets...

laborcontract 3y ago

I'm an Excel power(max?)(ultra!?) user and the only thing I want from an alternative to microsoft word on windows is a drop in replacement to their alt shortcuts. Those are the air that I breathe when using Excel and fast isn't fast if you're working slow.

billylitt 3y ago
Row Zero frontend dev here. Totally understand where you're coming from; we've heard this request from others and are interested in exploring a seamless solution for `alt` reliant power users like yourself. Drop me an email if you'd be interested in user-testing a solution! billy[at]rowzero.io

m1117 3y ago

But then I have to work faster

amelius 3y ago

Never understood spreadsheets. Why would you assume data fits in a 2d-array? And why put heterogenous data in that 2d-array in blocks at different x,y offsets? The future is tensors ;)

gamegoblin 3y ago
We have native dataframe support that encourages homogenous types, but we also want to meet Excel users where they are! Probably half the world's economy runs on Excel, it's the world's most popular programming language :)

fallingsprings 3y ago

Out of curiosity, do you support/have plans to support the broader set of Excel shortcuts that reference the ribbon? (Alt + <Key Sequence> shortcuts). Lots of excel power users more or less exclusively use the keyboard to navigate, and so have muscle memory for almost everything they do, including more niche operations (Insert Line Chart = Alt N N 1, or Change Column Width = Alt H O W). Will be a very hard sell to banks/other financial services corps if you can't match that aspect of excel. (They will probably also want local files and a native app).

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billylitt 3y ago
Good question - we've heard this feedback before and have some ideas for how to bake alt-shortcuts into the app for the muscle memory crowd. So, not yet, but its very much on our radar.

cha42 3y ago

Do you have any simd-optim in parsing all those large files ? I have read that you write some of your own parser for perf boost. (I am one of the author of https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath)

gamegoblin 3y ago
No SIMD in the parser path... yet... :) The main win from writing our own custom parser is writing directly into the final in-memory format from the parse stream without any intermediate allocations or data movement. Awesome project! Adding it to my list of things we may plug into in the future.
- cha42 3y ago
  Sealable spreadsheet is also awesome ! Congrats for the delivery.

sa46 3y ago

Is the pricing per user? $15/mo for an entire org sounds too good to be true.

NickBEnd 3y ago
The business pricing is $15 per user per month. We will clarify that on the pricing page.

jkaptur 3y ago

Quick bug report: I set A0 and A1 to 1, then set A2 =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1. As expected, A2 evaluated to 4. Then I right-clicked on the 1 row header and inserted 1 row above. Expected: A3 should become =SUM(A0:A2)+A0+A2 and evaluate to 4 Actual: A3 becomes =SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A2 and remains 4 until it is edited, at which point it evaluates to 3.

gamegoblin 3y ago
I just tested in Excel and Google Sheets and our behavior matches them here, unless I am misunderstanding the repro steps. For me, A3 becomes =SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 and remains 4 as it should be. The action I am taking: A0=1 A1=1 A2=SUM(A0:A1)+A0+A1 (evaluates to 4) Right click A0 and click "insert row above" Now I have: A0=empty A1=1 A2=1 A3=SUM(A1:A2)+A1+A2 (evaluates to 4) Thank you for trying to find edge cases! I have put literally hundreds of hours into stuff like this. Let me know if you have different repro steps.
- jkaptur 3y ago
  > Right click A0 and click "insert row above" Instead, right click A1 and click "insert row above". Google Sheets (and, I'm 99.99% sure, Excel) adjust the range inside the SUM to be three rows high. I've put quite some time into this sort of thing too :)
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    Didn't know who I was talking to, looked you up now, amazing ;) Thanks a lot for the bug report. We actually used to implement the range-extension logic in Excel/Sheets but removed it during a cut-paste refactor due to the complexity (I'm sure you know...) and resolved to add it back when someone asked for it. I actually found edge cases where Sheets and Excel don't do range extension logic the same way. So we don't do the range extension for now, but the 4 not getting recomputed to 3 is definitely a bug, will fix!
    - emeril 3y ago

free_bip 3y ago

This would be a heck of a lot cooler if it was a local-first desktop application. It's still cool mind you, but it could have been a heck of a lot _more_ cool.

runningamok 3y ago
Agreed. Even better if it was a local-first web application.
gamegoblin 3y ago
We have the capability to run it as a desktop app. How much do you think we should charge for it, and how do you think we should do support, feature additions, etc? We are open to the idea.

xiasongh 3y ago

Are you guys using polars or Data Fusion for any computations?

gamegoblin 3y ago
We use Apache Arrow which is what Data Fusion and Polars also use

nojvek 3y ago

One of the powers of excel is that it is your data on your machine. You can work fully offline, no SaaS monthly crap. Row zero is nice, don’t get me wrong. But the whole idea of me giving them gigabytes of data, or the creds to production database is a big no no. If a 3rd party has your creds, they will eventually get hacked.

novoreorx 3y ago

Not trying to relate with AI, GPT, or LLM in a spreadsheet product is the best thing to me, kudos!

gamegoblin 3y ago
We will add a little tasteful AI stuff later, but it's not the highest priority. Top priority is big data and fast data. AI is relatively easy to layer on later.
- novoreorx 3y ago
  I agree, AI should not be the central focus, but when appropriately integrated, it can be highly beneficial.

crashabr 3y ago

My current issue with Google Sheets is that it gets really slow when I connect tries to load data from dozens of sheets into a single one using multiple importrange. Does your solution work better for this use case?

billylitt 3y ago
This use case is where we shine. Sheets is a great tool, but its performance is limited by your browser's memory, whereas Row Zero compute is happening in the cloud. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

matrix1010 3y ago

For people who want to process their XLSX/CSV files locally and want some easy to use ETL tool, maybe take a look Tablesmith: https://tablesmith.io/ https://tablesmith.io/, it's free to use.

voltaireodactyl 3y ago

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?

JoiDegn 3y ago
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.
- voltaireodactyl 3y ago
  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.
breckognize 3y ago
I don't know enough about QuickBooks to say we can replace it. But we do have enterprise accounting teams using us to pivot millions of rows of general ledger data. So if you're looking to (e.g.) create summaries of categorized expenses, we're great for that. Where are you importing your financial data from?

phantarch 3y ago

Congrats Row Zero team on the launch! Excited to see all the cool ways people will think to use the product :)

aembleton 3y ago

I could import matplotlib but I couldn't work out how to display the output. I guess that this library is supported otherwise I wouldn't be able to import it. How do I display it's output. This is the function I'm trying to run: def plot(lat,lng): plt.scatter(x=lng, y=lat) plt.show();

gamegoblin 3y ago
Adding image support from Python is on our roadmap

wcallahan 3y ago

If our data source is Postgres, can edits/updates be sent directly back to Postgres? If the import is one-way right now, are there any plans to make the above possible?