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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here actually bothered by the speed of the core calculation engine of Google sheets?

I'm bothered by the sluggishness of the UI, but I've never typed '=A1+A2' in a box and found it takes too long to get an answer.

Even if it did, I'd kinda like million row X million column sheets to somehow be server side and my machine simply views a local window, and calculations happen locally if feasible with locally available data, or server side otherwise.

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The problem isn't any one calculation. It is when you update a cell that causes many, many cells to need to recompute.

> be server side and my machine simply views a local window, and calculations happen locally if feasible with locally available data

I assume this is what is happening? The client tries to recompute the data locally. But bails out on cells where it is missing input data. Then the server responds with an authoritative copy of visible data that the client applies over top of its guesses.

Came here looking for this comment. 100% yes. After a certain number of rows (tens of thousands) the UI becomes unstable. Maybe it’s a skill issue though.

I don't have experience with Google Sheets, but it's definitely an issue in Excel with complex sheets.

It's more of an issue when you have a few 100k lines and lots of layers of different lookups etc.

Probably not bothered because it's fast thanks to this work. I'd probably be bothered if it was slow.

Yes I have. If you aren't bothered, it means you haven't opened sheets containing enough calculations. EarlyRetirementNow (a blog) has a large and comprehensive retirement Google sheet that runs a series of simulations with historical returns of many asset classes (equities, bonds, gold, etc) over more than a century of data, while allowing you to specify custom cash flows and withdrawal rates and whatnot. You definitely feel not just the sluggishness of the UI but also the calculations themselves.

The sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QGrMm6XSGWBVLI8I_DOA...?

A video tutorial to use the sheet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CClhsaBbTm0

One box is not slow.

Tens of thousands can be, depending on what you are doing, if there is VLOOKUP, etc.

I mean, I've definitely been bothered by things not changing when I change them; but I never thought that was the core calculation engine.

I don't need to do a lot of MMO spreadsheets though, so I generally try to use Apache OpenLibreOffice.org locally, and it never stalls because of client-server communication.

Would you pay for that?

No - all web apps should be designed with the idea that the client only has a little CPU, ram and storage, and if the user tries to do something outside those capabilities, the server should do the work.

Nobody expects a Google search to involve the client crawling the whole web and picking out your search keywords...

How is that an answer to the question? Your explanation shows how the service is pretty much doing everything which seems to justify why a paid service would be acceptable. If they provided free code but your had to pay the expense of running it locally would be more of a justifiable reason for not finding a need for paying.

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