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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files.

Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.

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You should check out Row Zero (https://rowzero.io). We launched on HN earlier this year. Our CSV handling is the best on the market.

You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.

> Our CSV handling is the best on the market.

It’s ironic that you cite the one thing that being bad at hasn’t held Excel back. ;)

I suppose. But as a software developer I've never created an Excel spreadsheet that wasn't first a CSV. I do most of my own work with local data files in jq for JSON or q for CSV, then go from a CSV to an Excel spreadsheet only when it's time to communicate that data with non-programmers.

Their niche is clearly supposed to be in helping developers and data scientists make that same leap, from the tools and formats native to their data pipelines to feature-rich spreadsheets as an export/reporting/analysis format for consumption by people who otherwise don't code. CS V support (especially for huge files) is unusually important there.

or skip the spreadsheet and go relational with DuckDB. Pretty cool to run directly against a set of CSVs and get performant, results in a language most of us already know and use regularly.

Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.

I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.

The finance department in a previous job rather undramatically moved over to Google Sheets from Excel after seeing the befits of the collaboration/online environment.

They got some help by me for moving out the heavy stuff to SQL/BigQuery but that was also for the better. BigQuery and Sheets integrate very well these days so they could even use a Google sheet as a UI for the queries. Rows and columns, much better than any other web UI.

(Yes I believe you are being silly)

I think Google Sheets is nearly miraculous, with all that it can do as a web app, but it's amazing to me that anybody actually seriously using Excel in a professional capacity could migrate to it. They're not in the same weight class.

There's nothing silly about wanting to avoid the sandcastle-built-on-quicksand world of web applications.

Sadly, the world of native apps, at least in the commercial space, seems to be drifting away from the tenants of stability and user control that the space used to exemplify. Excel 365 (or whatever the hell MS wants to call it) randomly auto-updates itself without warning or confirmation.

I've used both for a long time (relatively so for Sheets given its age). The online aspect aside, Sheets does tend to work for 90% of my use cases. But that last 10%? It doesn't come close to what I can accomplish with Excel. Exotic dimensions in data, frankly better pivot table support, and perhaps most maddening, the much faster macros....

I created a simple function/macro once in Sheets to help me indicate when a group of rows were done; I had to watch my 3-5k sheet painfully iterate through every line and assign new colors. The script system even gave up at some point after I closed my laptop(? So much for online!..), and I had to manually restart it.

>But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do

The interface is customizable. You can remove any icons or group of icons on the ribbon that you don't like and you can reorganize them in any way you want. Just right click on the ribbon and click "customize the ribbon".

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