Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

Rows 2.0: The easiest way to use data on a spreadsheet

rows.com

85 pointsent10157 comments

We moved from Google Sheets to use a "fancy spreadsheet" product and the missing table stakes were a lot more painful than the benefits of the fancy features.

Turns out Google Sheets has solved a lot of corner cases that we took for granted.

dont stop there, can you remember some examples?

Navigating using the keyboard, drag/drop for reordering rows/columns (in a way that wasn't painful), conditional formatting on ranges of cells.

At the end of the day, we actually didn't want or need the rigid structure we thought we did .... or at least it wasn't worth giving up the polish of Sheets.

Tks for elaborating! I’m the founder of Rows

it’s not clear to me if that comparison is with Rows or another product

Rows is built to be as flexible as any other spreadsheet

- You can add whatever you want in a cell, literals, formulas, we even support json as a primitive type. - we got the same formulas vlookup sum sumifs filter query, plus hundreds new ones like get, put, post, schedule, expand - we got conditional formatting (not as powerful as sheets, we will get there). - we we got shortcuts, above it all ctrl-k/ Cmd-k, but also many block navigation ones (ctrl+arrow, Cmd+arrow), excel windows compatible shortcuts (f2/f4), and a bunch of others.

Anything in particular you think is a dealbreaker for you?

Tx for responding.

My feedback isn't specific to Rows. The dealbreaker for us was post-evaluation. On paper, the alternative option looked preferable but it wasn't until we started using it that the friction became problematic.

The only suggestion I have is to closely watch standard interactions that users coming from a traditional spreadsheet have.

Rows looks great and I hope my post didn't come off wrong. The issues I had may (or may not) be applicable to Rows. I appreciate your willingness to listen.

I figured it wasn't specific. I know exactly what you mean by this friction. We will work hard to establish ourselves as a trusted, safe choice.

Impressive domain. How much did that cost?

Would it be too cynical of me to ask if I'll be seeing advertisements for Rows.com on every subway platform from London to New York?

$110k USD. We won’t do subway ads.. not in the next years at least.

https://rows.com/blog/post/why-and-how-we-rebranded

I usually try to refrain from posting negative comments, but start of that product video was a bit annoying to watch. Are you trying to showcase your product or to make an animation fitting a cool song you just found? (Maybe it is intentional, it made me post this comment after all :).

We have tried many videos. Our team has full discretion (the way to do it) so I wasn't involved directly.

AFAIK the purpose is to excite the target users (marketing managers, operations, business managers) to the potential. We have done other videos with other stories.

Your point is that we should be more intentional in the story? slower? How would you approach a video about a spreadsheet?

I often wonder about products like this. It seems to me that access solved many of these problems years ago then just faded away. I don't know why, I don't know why these are better either. Other than being collaborative and in the cloud. Those are huge benefits but why didn't access carry on to the cloud?

I feel like I'm missing some understanding of the low code space.

I'd like to learn these tools one day to allow me to rapidly put together CRUD apps but every CRUD app I build seems to have some edge case that would not be a good fit. So I carry on the old fashioned way. I'm sure I'm wasting time manually plumbing data between the database and the front end but oh well.

I have a theory that SQL Server made so much cash that Microsoft didn’t want Access to eat its lunch. It could have made a lot of progress in the last 25 years even with a reasonably small team.

Honestly something that could start as a local Access file and later be “hosted” on-premises for collaborative usage and later move to (e.g. Microsoft’s) cloud for wider usage/easy hosting would be useful to a lot of folk. The forms etc could migrate to HTML (rendered via local webviews / websites on a users browser).

Rows isn’t for apps. It’s for spreadsheets proper.

Just that Rows assumes 2 things:

1. you got to import data from your cloud tools (SaaS like GoogleAnalytics, BigQuery, Looker, Ads platforms,… and your own custom APIs). It’s hard to do on excel and sheets, not flexible and hard to automate.

2. You want to share spreadsheets in a way they render well on mobile.

That’s why we made rows (im a founder)

You guys are completely hosed I’m afraid, tomorrow I’m unveiling my competing project ‘columns 3.0’. We would have beat you to market but we’re big fans of late materialization.

here we go again, OLAP vs OLTP debates as far as the eye can see

Rows by any other name is still rows.

But would rows by any other name compress as sweet?

I'm crushing all you people with my 4d column spreadsheet. rows on rows on rows on rows. Boom!

…and make it Z-order! :-)

column.com is a Bank as a service API haha I tried to apply to them but heard nothing back, they seem super cool, not sure about columns!

what is this, Slashdot?

Lol!

You will be beat by Cells.com

lol

I'm sorry but you have to improve on the very first example that you are using to showcase your stuff. What is a graph supposed to tell me where the X axis goes from pages per session to avg time per page? Why are there continuous lines connecting quantities that somehow seem to change units?!

Unconvincing.

I am Alberto and I work in the Growth team at Rows. Right, that chart does make little sense, we're going to update it

Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated.

fixed it!

Calling it a spreadsheet and making it look and work like a spreadsheet is a bad idea, because now you're competing against Excel.

It does work like a spreadsheet.

The point is to compete against Excel.

At this point, can all new "super spreadsheet" products please come with a standardised proforma comparing them to the other 50 super spreadsheet apps along a set of standardised comparison points please?

I genuinely do not have the time to compare between this, air table, Monday.com, smart sheet, etc etc etc

I hear you, but you know it is not much different than the variety of programming languages or frameworks we are used to. I think there is still a huge market for new spreadsheet apps. Some will succeed and most will not. At this point my hot favorite ones I would like to learn more about are grid.is, rows.com and equals.com. But I am sure there are tons I don't know

But programming languages and frameworks do compare themselves with others, regularly and in many different ways.

Keyword bids on rows + grid, equals monday just went crazy.

I get your point, but at least they don't expect me to pay them money for the privilege of finding out what they actually do (assuming we're talking open source ones).

Rows is free for regular spreadsheet usage (files, cells, formulas)

You pay only if you use lots of Integrations!!

IMO spreadsheets must have cell-level flexibility and similar formulas

Monday.com and Airtable are not spreadsheets.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet, geared towards enterprises

Rows is a spreadsheet

For financial institutions this is a nonstarter. The data needs to stay local for pci compliance

Anybody know of a decent process embeddable spreadsheet engine, not web embedded in website embedding, but linked in process.

Ideally C++. I ended up taking sc-im codebase and wrestling with it to embed it in a system. Old school I know but it works.

Python’s pandas. Or Apache Arrow (more data structure, but with some calc capabilities). Granted, they’re not spreadsheets per se. Rather, they’re dataframe-centric programming.

Not really what I mean. Spreadsheet implements a generic formula evaluation engine that triggers updates on value changes efficiently.

if you need only an engine which does formula evaluation and update of dependency when a value changes, it doesn't look that hard to implement.

Would Excel interop work? It's not in the same process and horribly inefficient but will always result in Excel compatible spreadsheets.

https://www.chriswirz.com/software/excel-cpp-2019

I’m interested in higher performance and don’t really care about file or data output. I can also deal with the UI issues.

Basically it’s the core calculation and formula engine I was hoping was implemented as a library that could be plugged into another application.

Okay, in that case not a good option.

Good luck, that sounds like a very useful tool you're building.

I can forsee that there would be a YC startup creating a opensource clone of this.

I just won't take any spreadsheet app really seriously until someone comes anywhere near the Excel table object (which is queryable with the built-in Power BI!).

I do think Google Sheets actually is much more pleasant to use than Excel, especially given the collaboration feature, but once you start getting fancy with Excel Query Pivot Tables anyone who's not an actual full-time developer starts salivating.

You can query Rows with QUERY(), with the new PARSE() that uses JsonPath schema. Pretty powerful.

Beyond that you can use the free Restful API.

What exactly are your needs from Excel Query Pivot Tables? What’s the best of it?

Really cool promo video. I'm not sure what is particularly unique compared to what we now have in tools like Coda and such. Maybe more spreadsheet-focused than the others?

Yes. More spreadsheet focused.

You start with a grid. Grid is flexible and you get cells with literals or cells with formulas.

The new stuff is Integrations, to import and automate data from Saas tools (your API, BigQuery, Ads platforms, Google Analytics, Slack etc).

And Sharing, as every spreadsheet is shareable as a webpage and every table/ chart is embeddable.

Amazing spreadsheet tech! Big fan since the days of dashdash. Anyone interested in new applications of good old spreadsheets I recommend getting and account and trying it out

1GB of spreadsheet storage would be enough for a grand total of 4 spreadsheets for a lot of use cases of some teams at my company.

1Gb per spreadsheet.

Hi. Ricardo Felgueiras here. I work at Rows.

We increased this limit recently. It's 1 Gb per spreadsheet table. You can check the limits here https://rows.com/docs/platform-limits#tables

I bet in 50 years, I would still be able to open an Excel file I create today.

What is the long term data retention plan with rows.com?

That you can import from, and export to, Excel too

Is there any open source equivalent?

If I'm not wrong and they didn't rebuild it, it is written in Flutter.

unfortunately no. we had a separate project to launch a native app in flutter. it may have led to the web version being in flutter too.

We stopped that project last year due to resources (financial) reasons.

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