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I used to write spreadsheets that were 50mb and sometimes took a few minutes to compute (native computational stuff, not macros and not circular references).

I'd be very interested to know some generalised (non-IP) background on how you've achieved this speed increase.

Also, under what circumstances is this speed increase achievable? How have you measured the 100x?

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We got the speed increase primarily by dropping to low-level code (numpy, and sometimes C) in functions that cause bottlenecks. Multi-threading helps too.

The largest gains are in the scenario you mentioned - big spreadsheets with a lot of computation. Excel tends to choke on these.

There's also a huge amount of very very badly excel based 'applications' that could benefit from even a modest 2x speed increase.

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