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Comment by kcl | Hacker News Reader

Import/export is coming. Probably in the next release.

I'll be contrarian and say importing/exporting aren't required for the first release. This isn't about being a replacement for Excel on a computer.

It obviously should come soon, though, and my expectation would be to see it in a free update.

Any spreadsheet app should have some sort of import/export support ON LAUNCH DAY. The omission looks sloppy.

Just to make it clear, it's not that hard to do it. Here's a very basic example in javascript that took roughly 3 hours of time (this parses enough of the XLSX format to generate a CSV output with a few integers and strings; requires html5 file API to be able to manipulate the file in your browser. Best results on chrome):

http://niggler.github.com/js-xlsx/

source: https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx

There's an XLS version as well (doesn't support the full panoply of features):

http://niggler.github.com/js-xls/

source: https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls

I would have done the import/export functionality before adding Lua scripting.

No reason to release the product without having the data hooks in place. We don't need more silos.

Does this / will this hook into the Google Spreadsheet API to pull data from Google Docs?

Have you decided on what formats and/or third party services you will be exporting to?

All within reason. We're not going to try to be a silo, if that's what you mean. We want to be as interoperable with other applications as possible.

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