Accelerate Excel – 100x faster spreadsheets

This is really cool, and I have to say I&#x27;m impressed, but is excel speed a common problem for people?<p>Are you trying to monetize this? Who is your target market? I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt; <i>We&#x27;ve rewritten Excel&#x27;s computational engine from scratch. Our hand-optimized code blows Excel&#x27;s native engine out of the water.</i><p>Does the rewrite incorporate all of Excel&#x27;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&#x27;d be very interested to know some generalised (non-IP) background on how you&#x27;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 &quot;consolidation&quot; 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&#x2F;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&#x27;s always a tradeoff between design&#x2F;human cycles and speed. You could even think of it as Excel technical debt. Legacy spreadsheets never get rebuilt&#x2F;re-engineered because of a lack of human time. That&#x27;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?

Could you please post some benchmarks ? I&#x27;m really curious

If it is not proprietary, please explain how you force Excel to use your computation engine, rather than its own internal one?

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&#x27;t a development firm basically relies entirely on Excel.<p>I&#x27;ve already signed up (tom at cishub dot co dot uk) but the key point here for me is how easy it&#x27;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&#x27;ll require modifying existing spreadsheets and&#x2F;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&#x27;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: &quot;anonymous function,&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s an add-in, is it Windows-only (COM)?

Cool. Limited exit strategy though - you either sell to Microsoft or else what? I guess if the price is reasonable it makes sense.

I&#x27;m sitting here waiting on a spreadsheet to calculate so this interests me greatly.<p>However, I will say that if your spreadsheets aren&#x27;t calculating then you&#x27;re probably not using the proper tool for the job. I&#x27;ve inherited the ones I&#x27;m using and hope to simplify them as soon as I can figure out exactly what they&#x27;re doing.

I&#x27;d more interested in seeing a CUDA implementation. If they were able to get 100x baseline on the CPU, I&#x27;d expect the GPU implementation to be at least 1000x baseline as most tasks are &quot;infinitely&quot; parallelizable (row additions, multiplication etc.)

I want this, I&#x27;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&#x27;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?

Kudo&#x27;s on the speed up, but can you guarantee that the calculations are bug-free ?

Once again, Excel users on the Mac are unable to get all of the cool toys.

Hopefully this will be the nail in the coffin of &quot;big data&quot;.

What&#x27;s this written in?

We took &quot;Show HN&quot; out of the title because &quot;Show HN&quot; is for things that people can try out now: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;showhn.html</a>.

No source code? How are we supposed to make any use of this? What is the point of an email signup?