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Looks like a killer product, because there are a lot of business people who readily know how to write what is essentially functional code in Excel but for whatever reason cannot or will not write even simple map and reduce functions in a conventional programming language to extract information from a large Hadoop data set.

Are formulas or spreadsheet browsing limited in any way?

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Formulas should be used as columnar operations: you can apply one formula to every element of a column (map) or aggregate an entire column (reduce). (This isn't that much of a restriction - you can use If-Statements to make complex expressions here.)

Spreadsheet browsing is limited to a sample of the data (head + tail); you can set the size of the sample before pulling.

I don't think "conventional programming languages" (and in particular Java) are well suited to the task of analyzing and querying data.

But Excel is also an odd beast. It's used for laying out reports, pivot tables, plotting graphs, working with database, calculations and VBA macros. Not all features play well together.

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