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Comment by seestheday | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool, and I have to say I'm impressed, but is excel speed a common problem for people?

Are you trying to monetize this? Who is your target market? I'm genuinely curious.

I work at $BIGCORP in analytics with a lot of large excel spreadsheets every day. If I bump up against row limits or need functionality not available in excel I'll import into a corporate oracle db and manipulate it with SQL. A lot of the people that I collaborate with can only use Excel and it's often faster to just manipulate data there rather than put it into a real db or parse it with another tool.

With modern computers I can tell you it is a very rare occurrence that I cause excel to choke. On the order of once a quarter.

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Most people who do heavy analytics in Excel don't have the option of importing something into a DB and using SQL, either because they aren't familiar with SQL or because they have to send the spreadsheet (and not just the result of the calculation) to someone who does.

Right now we're focusing on building the software over monetization - the beta is free and will be for a while. Our target market is Excel-based analysts. They're found in a lot of sectors, finance and ad-tech being two major ones.

>is excel speed a common problem for people?

There are people who will pay for any amount of speed in a spreadsheet. These people buy the fastest PCs they can to run overnight spreadsheets that involve sloshing millions of dollars around. Large chunks of the world's financial industries run in Excel macros. (Be very afraid.)

Ah, yes I could see various FI's being a fantastic market for this.

To really get entrenched they could price it at serious enterprise pricing, build case studies, do enterprise sales etc. and could make some serious money with the right sales/marketing.

I make Excel choke regularly. For example, copy-pasting a complicated vlookup down 1 million rows takes forever.

Why not just dump all table...?

Combining =index() and =match() seems to be less computationally intensive than =vlookup() -- give it a shot.

I've had entire days spent copying formulas down 5000 rows (x20-50 cols), copy, paste-values, and repeat. Can't wait to try this out, just signed up for the beta.

Another thought -- as someone who runs windows on a VM on my mac almost purely for excel purposes, this could enable me to go 100% mac. The biggest downfall to mac's excel seems to be a computation engine that's far behind the windows version.

> but is excel speed a common problem for people?

Anyone who sets excel to "manual calculation" mode to avoid pauses whenever they make a change in a big spreadsheet might be interested in this. If this engine removes the need for that, it could be a pretty big deal. It'll definitely make things easier for me when I'm messing with material testing data.

But like you said, how do you market it? How do you reach the people who need it? I suspect that for most people excel is just a tool, and they're not involved in excel communities or excel culture (if such things exist) in a way that would allow them to discover something like this.

I don't think I even work with very large Excel sheets, but our massive master sheet of 1mil+ rows (with about 15 columns) regularly causes Excel to sputter and die.

I'd rather not use it, but anything to make it work better would be awesome.

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