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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

> * 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?

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

Indeed. In addition to the UI issues, there's no way this product can be "the fastest spreadsheet" when it's browser-based. By definition it runs at least ten times slower than native apps will.

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!

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

> the benchmark is Excel

That's certainly true among a subset of users who demand Excel power features, but it is not a universal benchmark. People who more highly value collaboration might prefer Google Sheets. There are tons of users and use cases where the choice of local storage is irrelevant or even a drawback.

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network.

Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work!

pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

The benefit of files is that they are a consistent, application-independent abstraction. You can copy, move, rename, backup, version, and generally organize them however you want, restrict or grant access, without being constrained by what the respective application supports. Importantly, you can organize files from different applications together without those applications having to know anything about each other. Hyperlinks are no substitute for the object-like, independent nature of files.

Applications that are not based on files create their own little separate universe, or rather island, that isn’t really interoperable.

> files are consistent and application-independent

I see diverse, inhomogenous state schemas that are deeply coupled to the originating application (internal data structures serialized to disk!) and have arbitrary legacy structural constraints ("document") as well as seams between application silos

You’re talking about the file contents, not about files as objects.

Regarding the file contents, how is that different when the data is proprietarily stored in hidden SaaS databases?

I sense a trap, but i'll bite – APIs and schemas and other logical data models can be remixed, at least in principle. Physical data models (i.e. coupled to storage layout) are too low level to be useful, all you can do is load them back into into their originating app.

I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen

And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!

Ok, you're right – i don't think a smooth transition is possible in the office market – but I also don't think you can disrupt Office from within. Example: the thing that disrupted the New York Times was not a better newspaper, rather Facebook

I agree! Which is why I'm not building the next Excel, but rather something different which offers (or "will offer") ~feature parity with Excel spreadsheets but approaches knowledge work and document authoring from an entirely new angle

Microsoft teams has the option to open all shared files in the browser so you can have multiple "teams" Microsoft files open at once. This is the direction spreadsheets are going.

I agree it feels clunky to me who grew up on excel the application. I memorized a few dozen keyboard shortcuts that are all broken in the "teams collaboration browser spreadsheet" sigh.

Team's files is sharepoint under the hood, which is why it sucks.

Sharepoint would be so good if the UI was faster and more consistent. Also why is the search so impressively bad?

In Teams you can not work on a Excel Sheet shared in a chat. You have to share it in a Team .. you have to ask the IT to create a Team for you first .. great.

For certain apps, it feels much more comfortably mentally compartmentalized when that focus is not in browser... (this is just my opinion), but I find that I typically have so many tabs open - I like to have certain things on not my browser (at times a tab can crash the whole browser)

Attempting to import from various sources (urls and upload) and it fails:

https://i.imgur.com/YV865bw.png

It also stalls for a really long time arttempting to link to large CSV URLS... and it fails on JSON.

This 37kb CSV file took over a minute to load:

https://i.imgur.com/tHN4Wq0.png

It has ONE ROW.

I assume im holding it wrong, the local CSV has thousands of rows:

https://i.imgur.com/fujf1p5.png

---

I had to reload the session to get it to allow import, and this 37... and it took 24 seconds to import the data:

https://i.imgur.com/LnFIgL3.png

Linking to a URL and hitting import it thinks for a bit or fails....

We wrote our own CSV parser to get fast import performance, and we do occasionally encounter novel encodings and weirdness. I sent you an e-mail to get more details.

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