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Grid (YC S12) Reinvents The Spreadsheet For The Tablet Age
- zbruhnke 14y agoKudos to Josh and the rest of the team. This is something that can change the market in a positive way and hopefully help take iPads from being almost solely a device for consumption to a device used to spur creation and innovation as well
- cpr 14y agoLooks great. Would be nice to see a demo of its number-crunching capabilities, to judge whether it's innovative in that area as well.
- milesskorpen 14y agoAccording to the article, they don't have that yet. Which seems ... surprising.
- caublestone 14y agoReally impressive demonstration of re-thinking an unsexy technology that is so important to so many. A great example on how start ups can disrupt a giant like Microsoft by being bold and not giving a shit. Good luck Grid!
- floggit 14y agoUI reminds me of MS Maestro. Any idea how much of it is patented by MS ? Either way they would be a great acqui-hire target for MS
- Gring 14y agoThey have a demo video, here: http://grid.binarythumb.com/ http://grid.binarythumb.com/ Unfortunately, the sound mix is atrocious. Music is way too loud, one can barely hear the narration. It was so bad that I stopped viewing the video.
- ereckers 14y agoI first listened to this from the TechCrunch article on an iPad through the speakers and it didn't seem all that bad. I got to my desktop and was going to give you a hard time, but listened to it again with my headphones on. Yeah, the sound could definitely benefit from being turned down a few notches toward the middle of the video. Surprisingly it seems to calm down towards the end.
- johnrob 14y agoIt seems like the focus is on casual usage (photos, videos, etc). Why not focus more on the business side (i.e. numbers)?
- webwright 14y agoI'd go the same route. The features a consumer needs are much lighter. I imagine the hope is that someday people will realize, "Hey wait a minute! This thing kicks Excel's ass!". Quote from PG: "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest." http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
- johnrob 14y agoThey might be better served to drop the 'Spreadsheet' moniker. It leads people to incorrect assumptions about the product and likely filters out potential users. 'Whiteboard', 'Slideshow', and 'Scrapbooking' are all terms that seem to better represent the (current) intended use case.
- pg 14y agoThis is just a version one. They're going to do all the numeric stuff too.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- smikhanov 14y agoShameless plug: I made an app for that. It's called Scalar (http://scalarapp.com http://scalarapp.com). It takes a different approach to handling calculations than Excel or Grid (abandons the table structure completely), but hey, unlike Grid founders I wasn't on Microsoft Excel team :)
- roycyang 14y agoGreat job guys. I've tried in vain to use google docs on my iPad when I was doing wedding planning. This is a killer app.
- mikepmalai 14y agoMaestro looks really interesting. As an excel power user and fan of spreadsheet innovation in general, I always felt that an excel disruptor would probably look and feel more like a robust post-it note than a spreadsheet.
- vegashacker 14y agoSeeing those big squares was startling (in a good way). It was like, of course! Why have tiny little horizontal cells on a tablet spreadsheet? And with calendar widget datatypes, images, iPhone data entry... Lots of clever happening here. I didn't see any formulas though. Not even a sum. I wonder how that's going to be in Grid.
- stcredzero 14y agoBasically, they're trying to get more people to use spreadsheets in a non-business way. People already do, but the natural way to grab more users right now, is to put it on a multitouch tablet. I think stats and a lot of other serious number-crunching/business oriented software is ready for multitouch disruption. I've been toying with the idea of taking an all-in-one HP multitouch pc and turning it into a "workstation surface" mounted horizontally and implementing serious business apps on it. I'm in part motivated by my girlfriend's RSI. (Non-carpal tunnel!) Touch interfaces and styluses seem to bother her much less. No stats programs let you use it end-to-end that way.
- danso 14y agoBusiness spreadsheets most definitely need help, though perhaps mobile Google Drive, which is currently atrocious, is too intimidating to take on. However, I have to applaud anything that moves our information-consumption into a more delimited, structured form. I love narrative and paragraphs, but Tufte's small multiples is something that would greatly help day-to-day communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_multiple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_multiple
- robomartin 14y ago> Business spreadsheets most definitely need help In what way? Are you talking about design (look and feel) or capabilities. I can't think of too many things that could be lacking from Excel in terms of capabilities for business and engineering applications.
- danso 14y agoSorry, I meant in the context of the headline "...for the tablet age"...My experience so far has been with Google Spreadsheets through the iPad browser and it is barely functional. Microsoft's offering may be better, but still short of what traditional Excel users are used to. In any case, Excel/Google Docs have such a strong, relied-upon foundation that even if someone built a great spreadsheet from scratch that was unparalleled for the tablet audience, the risk of being dominated by a sudden entrance of either Microsoft/Google is probably too much to commit the funding that's needed to build the infrastructure to support such a platform. I think Grid is doing the right thing, but staying away from the business-type spreadsheet...as there are plenty of ways that spreadsheets are useful, even without numbers. I use spreadsheets all the time to plan out projects and take notes, as I know I want to end up adding categories/subcategories/deadline columns that I want to aggregate/sort upon.
- erikpukinskis 14y agoExcel doesn't lack capabilities, but it lacks in the ability to surface those capabilities to the people who need them.
- runemadsen 14y agoI really like the general idea of this app. The killer feature would be an easy way to contribute new features for the tiles, which would basically make Grid into an easy-to-use Microsoft Metro UI.
- atacrawl 14y agoOne feature that’s still missing, though, is actually running spreadsheet-style calculations on your numbers in Grid. Doesn't this preclude Grid from being a spreadsheet app?
- mej10 14y agoIt isn't even that hard to get a basic implementation of such functionality. Not sure why this is missing. Just make a directed graph out of cell references. Get the strongly connected components. All of the components with more than one vertex contain a loop and can't be computed. Remove those and you get a directed acyclic graph. Now you can topological sort them for cell dependencies, and start calculating them in the order they are needed. Or if your language has a dataflow implementation it is even easier. Haven't seen one of these for Obj-C though. I will add that this looks pretty cool, though.
- martythemaniak 14y agoIt may be easy, but it'll still take time to develop. If it's not critical and won't keep you from getting your initial batch of users, it's much better to launch and add it in 3 weeks, rather than waiting an extra 3 weeks to launch.
- mej10 14y agoI may have sounded a bit negative, but I don't think it was a "bad" move, especially seeing as how I am personally excited about Grid even without it currently having this feature. It just shouldn't come as a surprise when a lot of people question the choice of leaving out the #1 feature of spreadsheets. Even on version one.
- hassy 14y agoYou forgot parsing the formulae. You forgot having to decide which functions to include and implementing them. You forgot testing. Sure those aren't super hard, but minutes add up to hours and hours add up to days which turn into weeks. Most importantly, you forgot the UI. Building the UI for entering formulae - one that makes sense on the iPad and not just a copy of the one from Excel or Numbers (those suck) - would take a while.
- tapertaper 14y agoExcel power user here. Any plans for inter-compatibility? If Grid can simply view other spreadsheet formats (even stripped of formulas and formatting), you'll get a lot of looks from the business world.
- revorad 14y agoThis looks fantastic. The lack of computation is a surprising but very novel take on the idea.
- yabbadabbadoo 14y agoI shrugged this off at first, but that video blew my mind. Awesome work guys. Definitely using this for an upcoming roadtrip. And more :)
- kennystone 14y agoBeautiful UI and a great opportunity. The iPad demands to be taken everywhere, and Apple has proven with iWork - Keynote especially - that office apps can be awesome on a tablet. Google's Spreadsheet webapp, on the other hand, is completely unusable on touch devices.
- johnrob 14y agoI didn't see any mention of how you share with people - do they have to have the app as well? Can you just send them a link and let them view in a browser?
- newman314 14y agoWhen I first heard about this, I was excited. But upon looking at the video, it's not what I thought it would be. I'm still looking for an app that uses a spreadsheet-like UI in order to be able to ask whatif and model data pulled from backend datasources. This would be infinitely more useful (for my use cases).
- hiddenstage 14y agoJudging the UI and video, it appears they are catering their market towards consumers when I think they should be catering towards businesses. The only time I've used a spreadsheet for personal use was calculating a budget; but there are better apps than Grid for that (Mint). If I wanted to go camping with friends, I'd call/text/email them and use a text editor to keep track of names and items that we need. Now if they can get businesses to be productive on their tablets and phones on the other hand....
- kposehn 14y agoTheir greatest strength - social collaboration - is also a potential weakness. While I like the idea and the mechanic, the initial emphasis on social integration of a spreadsheet makes the assumption that others will be able to A: willing to download the app when invited & B: be able to use it with minimal instruction in a collaborative fashion. This may be something that many more tech-savvy users will embrace, but despite the simplicity of the UX it does require a mental hurdle to cross in order to utilize it fully. I think many people will certainly overcome that, but the question is how many. Is the market of users large enough for this use case? Of course, I may also be simply reading too much into the video - there will be plenty of other uses for this sort of app. I think this will become less and less of a problem as the next generation of tech users come of age and embrace technology like this. They're growing up with this sort of functionality and will use it in ways we can't yet anticipate. What Grid certainly has going for it is one of the most solid guesses at that sort of interaction I've seen so far. Despite my initial misgivings, I definitely want to give it a try.
- jmduke 14y agoI have two use cases for Excel: 1. Number crunching with the goal of creating charts/tables to be placed in either documents or presentations. 2. Detailed analysis of a given data set. I think the former is ripe for application in the tablet space; most of my presentations, at the very least, tend to be 'here, let me talk and rely on visualization for the things that aren't easily conveyed with speech' -- honestly, an app where I can create multiple charts and broadcast them will be great. Grid seems to be eschewing this use case in favor of having spreadsheets as tabularly organized content. While I don't have any specific issue with this, I don't see what problem or opportunity it addresses beyond "hey, nobody's done this!" I can see it having merit with the few times I'll use a GDoc spreadsheet for organizing, say, who brings what to a party (and I do suppose that GDocs is a fairer comparison to Grid than Excel, at this stage), but being tablet-only hamstrings that effort. I guess, overall, my question is: "What can I do with Grid that I can't do with anything else?"
- ereckers 14y agoLooks slick. I've got a use case for this. I help run an online accessories boutique with my partner. She works with editorial teams from numerous magazines in which they trade images, description, pricing, and other misc information for product features for upcoming issues. You know what they use? Spreadsheets. They look atrocious too. I could definitely see where something like this could be used to replace their current workflow. The fact that this can work on a tablet is even better. You know why? She prefers doing this type of work in the evenings, on an iPad, as we're relaxing away from our desks. It looks good. Seems easy to use, and looks fashionably well done; complete (really, you should see these spreadsheets they share back and forth). The only thing I've ever wondered about these types of tools -- with so many good new options coming out seemingly daily, is how you would get people on-board? I can see it working once everyone can agree to start using it, but getting people to completely change there toolset and workflow (especially if other partners are not, can not, or will not adopt it) can be a tough nut to crack.
- politician 14y agoI think that's where the interop story becomes a critical feature to drive adoption.
- jpxxx 14y agoI am in love with what I'm being shown. Super-rich compound multi-user documents. It could be fantastic wallboard software. Or you could just call it a wedding planner and it would be a minor sensation.
- politician 14y agoIn my opinion, this app is a reinvention of that idea of the touch-enabled photo tabletop -- the one where you can slide around photos and sort of pile them into collections. We've seen that demo on TED and I'm pretty sure on Microsoft's old Surface tabletop. They've taken that basic idea, and made a really cool semi-structured visualization, and added interesting widgets like the map. If you look at it from that angle, you've got something that really sounds pretty interesting and something that, hey, if I have a few bucks sure I'll play with it.
- rhplus 14y ago"He was the designer of Microsoft’s upcoming Excel 2013, after all" The concepts look great, but the pitch that he was "the designer of Excel 2013" rubbed me the wrong way. The Office UX design team is not a one man show. I thought maybe the reporter was puffing things up a little, but even on Josh's personal website[1] he's claiming he was the designer. "I worked as the Excel 2013 designer which I transitioned into from a software engineering role" [1] http://joshleong.com/ http://joshleong.com/
- davisml 14y agoSo it's graph paper that you can talk to?