Show HN: Spreadsheets in the browser with Box, Dropbox support | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spreadsheets in the browser with Box, Dropbox support

dchang.mit.edu

45 pointsbrettcvz13 comments

It suffers from the same defect all html spreadsheets do (even google docs): if you zoom/resize the screen, row/col alignment breaks.

Unbelievable how in this decade it is still almost impossible to make a table work like a spreadsheet in html. How hard would it be to just enforce a couple of css properties in tables to make them behave? Like:

    tbody {overflow:auto;}

That would be a great start. Then:

    thead,tfoot{position:fixed;}
    tbody td:first-child{position:fixed}

That'd be all, add a contentEditable attribute and that's it. Everything else is just a matter of coding tricks to format cells and formulas.

Hello Whatwg, you listening? I know w3c is been deaf for long, that's why I am asking you. Hixie alive? Earth is calling.

* Here is a basic implementation using box model and display:-webkit-box; (chrome/safari in OSX only) http://georgenava.appspot.com/demo/spreadsheetcalc.html

Your implementation breaks after 1 zoom increase. The OPs implement breaks after 4.

Google Spreadsheet is the only implementation to get it right, as far as I can tell.

All break, even google's and mine. Point is there should be ONE easy way using just a single table and not a miriad of hacks with floating divs all over and resize/repaint triggers everytime something moves.

That's exactly my complain.

* View-source: mine is just one table and nothing else, no hacks. Take a look at google's implementation and try to make sense of it. That's my point, just one table should be enough to make it work.

I tried doing something along the lines, using a table, years ago (way before Google Spreadsheet). I remember trying to resize columns was painfully slow at the time; I had to create a ghost "separator" that appeared when resizing lines and columns, and only actually resizes when the user releases the mouse button.

Their use of divs instead of a table might be explained by issues like this.

Of course, this is no excuse for allowing it to break when zooming.

It also suffers from the much larger defect of not actually being a spreadsheet at all, but just being a big editable table (i.e. formulas don't work) - if a spreadsheet is indeed what it is intended to be.

Major props to my friend David for making this. It's a mashup of Handsontable (https://github.com/warpech/jquery-handsontable) and Filepicker.io (https://www.filepicker.io/)

That's a big editable table, not a spreadsheet. But as an editable table, it's nice.

+100

First thing I did was type =SUM(C1:C4) into one of the cells...which, based on the title, didn't do what I expected.

I will say good start but not useful though. Except entering numbers I couldn't do any thing. One good thing is it is very light. The reason people use excel because you can do lot more than just entering numbers.

Yeah I didn't want to say "Excel" because it's no where near excel level. But it's still cool!

Why all the negativity?

I personally think the ability to open and save "cloud" spreadsheets was nicely done.

Is this meant to be a Google Docs/Drive competitor?

Perhaps far down the line, for now it was just a quick hack exploring Filepicker.io and Handsontable

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