This is really cool, and I have to say I'm impressed, but is excel speed a common problem for people?<p>Are you trying to monetize this? Who is your target market? I'm genuinely curious.<p>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.<p>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.
> <i>We've rewritten Excel's computational engine from scratch. Our hand-optimized code blows Excel's native engine out of the water.</i><p>Does the rewrite incorporate all of Excel's important native functions? (e.g. the ones that would most likely be used with 10^5 rows of data)
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).<p>I'd be very interested to know some generalised (non-IP) background on how you've achieved this speed increase.<p>Also, under what circumstances is this speed increase achievable? How have you measured the 100x?
I see you guys have you been exploring the spreadsheet world for a while. Have you had a look at financials consolidations? The de facto software for this is Hyperion and it is terrible. Also, nothing I know of allows to build complex web reports. Another "consolidation" tool is BPC, which is another nightmare to maintain. Everything I am using in my controlling job makes you waste literally days a month due to bad implemented UI, functionalities and overall slowness (even business objects/hana is not that fast...).
I am a heavy heavy Excel user. I use it to help run a large startup.<p>100x faster would be a huge win. There's always a tradeoff between design/human cycles and speed. You could even think of it as Excel technical debt. Legacy spreadsheets never get rebuilt/re-engineered because of a lack of human time. That's a large cause of spreadsheets that become unmanageable.<p>2 questions around this:
- How do we know the data is secure? (the IT team will want to know this for sure)
- How do we know the computations are correct?
This looks really cool.<p>My mum (not me, unfortunately for you!) works in Accountancy and the entire industry is spreadsheet-driven. IT bods on HN might not realise this, but the accounting department of nearly every BigCo that isn't a development firm basically relies entirely on Excel.<p>I've already signed up (tom at cishub dot co dot uk) but the key point here for me is how easy it's going to be for <i>her</i> -- a non-technical accountant, but excel expert -- to integrate it with her existing spreadsheets.<p>Also, wether it'll require modifying existing spreadsheets and/or ways of working to take advantage.<p>Definitely one to watch, could be a ridiculous moneyspinner if you get it right.
How much creative potential do you have? Are you limited to Excel types or could you extend it arbitrarily?<p>VBA is a kludge, but I've always thought that spreadsheets might be an interesting programming environment if you were restricted to the native functionality with a small addition. Namely, add a new value type: "anonymous function," which consists of parameters with an excel-native body, which can be assigned to a cell. You could then call the function by referring to the cell it's stored in (or any other way you can get a reference to it) and passing parameters. Function naming would work by using named ranges.
Where does DataNitro run - is it an add-in, is it a desktop program that operates on external Excel files, or are the files uploaded to, and processed on your site? If it's an add-in, is it Windows-only (COM)?
I'm sitting here waiting on a spreadsheet to calculate so this interests me greatly.<p>However, I will say that if your spreadsheets aren't calculating then you're probably not using the proper tool for the job. I've inherited the ones I'm using and hope to simplify them as soon as I can figure out exactly what they're doing.
I'd more interested in seeing a CUDA implementation. If they were able to get 100x baseline on the CPU, I'd expect the GPU implementation to be at least 1000x baseline as most tasks are "infinitely" parallelizable (row additions, multiplication etc.)
I want this, I've been wanting this for the past four releases of Excel. Excel is a great tool for engineers. It gets the subpar results fast, while code, matlab, and DBs get's the fantastic results slow, which I hardly ever need.
Excel had major issues with statistical calculations prior to Excel 2010. Post 2010 there are still a few issues. Have you taken this into account and corrected any, or just duplicated the behaviour, or some other method?
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