Show HN: Egeria, a multidimensional spreadsheet for everybody

I have to say, first glance, I like the idea of this tool a lot. I normally use light weight spreadsheets like gnumeric when I feel the need to use them at all, and I'd love a more expressive kind of spreadsheet/database/pivot table like this.

At the outset however, I'd be concerned about integrating a tool into my workflow that, most dangerously, is a service that could disappear and take my work with it. Second most dangerously, is proprietary. Third most dangerously, lacks a community beyond the initial dev. Fourth, if it is a service, is not a 'zero knowledge' service.

So while I like this look of this tool very much, and I'm going through the tutorials and playing around with it, personally I see this as a difficult sell. At least for me. But... I dunno, I don't think I'm the kind of demographic that moves markets.

You might see some kinds of success with this by emulating the gitlab model. open source the central components of it for personal use, and try to get some companies looking at it with enterprise-y features?

Currently I store everything in Excel. All the modifiers and modifier-combinations (lctrl, lalt, lshift, lctrl+lalt, lctrl+ralt+lshift ...) correspond to columns, all the modified keys (a-z, 0-9, ...) column to rows.

But being limited to 2 dimensions can be very inconvenient. For example since you have at least 6 modifier keys (ctrl, alt, shift keys on both left and right, 8 if you include windows keys, 9 if you include remapped capslock), trying to cover all the modifier combinations (e.g. lctrl+ralt+lshift) leads to combinatorial explosion and make the number of columns totally unmanagable. (It becomes even trickier when you want to define vim style sequences)

This looks like it's designed just for that purpose!!

My first thought was that all spreadsheets are at least 2D, some like SC are explicitly 3D, but the write up seems to suggest something different?

"Multidimensional data model: worksheets are organized by business entities (SKUs, departments, years, months, scenarios and so on). The data is stored in a more structured way which has many benefits like simple and robust computations across multiple worksheets "

-uses coloured cards as the main metaphor

-has pivot table functionality built-in

-is desktop based (Windows and Mac)

I think the card approach is very intuitive and is a good fit for where:

-the problem is 'chunky' and there are not more than a few hundred 'chunks'

-there are less than 20 dimensions

For example assigning resources to tasks.

One feature that would be immediately interesting for a specific userbase is to be able to import existing multi-dimensional arrays - e.g. netCDF / Zarr

There aren't tools available for being able to view those in a reasonable way currently (generally I'd use a REPL and be slicing & printing 2D chunks)

So even if it were import-only, this would be v useful

Is this an Anaplan competitor? If so, what are your key differences, value props?

What are you using as persistence layer? Postgresql? Mysql? Commercial? How well would it compose with existing ETL and BI tools? What is the concurrency model esp with regard to planned permissioning model? What happens when two differently permissions users run the same formulas?

It was super weird seing it on hn.