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Here's one use case: i tried importing a 500+ row wine spreadsheet into it (it has columns like type, producer, name, vintage, rating, source etc). I had to sa
by Erwin 12y ago
Here's one use case: i tried importing a 500+ row wine spreadsheet into it (it has columns like type, producer, name, vintage, rating, source etc).
I had to save the file as CSV and import it -- or at least that's what I thought, but filepicker seems to support picking from google drive. I don't know if it would have accepted a spreadsheet.
Your app seems sluggish to scroll compared to Google Docs at that size, and the record density seems low (I see 29 records per page vs 50 on Google Docs). This is using Chrome 38 on Linux.
The "link to another table" seems interesting, but my data came denormalized so I have a column with e.g. 10 different repeated values on 500 rows. Maybe it would be nice to automatically clean that up somehow. For example, I could Copy the column and have a some Paste (unique values only) option. Maybe the dialogue that comes up (suggesting to expand the spreadsheet) could even tell you about that. Or maybe there could be an option to convert a text field to a separated linked table.
I had some conditional formatting set up via Google Docs, which could be nice to have here; e.g. red wines have a red background in that wine type table.
I don't have a simple primary key -- it's really a composite of {wine producer, wine name, vintage}. The app didn't mind importing non-unique values into that first column. I don't know what the alternative might have been -- an auto-generated primary key?
Having said all of the above, I really like Google Docs and it will take some amazing features to make me switch to anything else. Multi-user planning and documentation via docs is great -- I have a shopping list everyone can update and I can see it change real time on the phone in the shop while someone is changing it from their desktop, and it's always up to date.
- aofstad 12y agoThanks a lot for your feedback, these are definitely things we're looking to tackle. We're planning on improving scrolling performance soon, it's definitely a priority for us to improve our performance for large datasets. As for the linking, we definitely want to do more to help you normalize your data. We can also infer column types to help with the import process. Doing this type of thing on paste is an interesting idea. We have some ideas for how to make it so that you don't need a primary column. One thing that you can do now is make the primary column a formula, and then reference other columns to generate a key.
- shrig94 12y agoIf you're interested in talking about the challenges of creating a performant spreadsheet, I've built a javascript-based spreadsheet backed by a database that's more performant than Google Docs/any open source table available on the internet. I'd be happy to share the techniques. Edit: reach me at shri (at) freshvc (dot) com
- aofstad 12y agoAwesome! Thanks for offering, we would love to hear your thoughts. I'll send you an email.
- mikegioia 12y agoHow about posting the source :P
- hughstephens 12y ago+1 would love to see the source ;)
- RA_Fisher 12y agoRedis would be a good idea to move that data around.