
Fivetran (YC W13) launches spreadsheet for data analysis  - georgewfraser
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/19/yc-backed-fivetran-launches-a-smart-online-spreadsheet-for-data-analysis/
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jeffwass
Why do I need to give Fivetran access to my google accounts to try out their
product? Eg, why can't I just enter my email account and click on the
confirmation email for identity confirmation like every other service?

From the google page:

    
    
      Fivetran is requesting permission to:
        View basic information about your account
        View your email address
    

I don't know what 'View basic information about your account' means, but No
Thanks.

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troymc
My first thought was, "How is this different from all the other online power
spreadsheets?" But then, buried in the footer of the homepage, I saw two _very
interesting_ links:

Unit Testing - "Finally, automated unit testing for Spreadsheets." [1]

Revision Control - "Revision Control For Spreadsheets. Track changes the way
developers do." [2]

[1] <https://www.fivetran.com/labs/spreadsheet-unit-testing>

[2] <https://www.fivetran.com/labs/spreadsheet-revision-control>

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polskibus
How do you think you'll be able to compete with other BI tools? For example
Tableau, has good table controls + lots of nice visualisations as add on? If
you aren't competing in BI market, who do you think your target is, and why
would they ditch Excel with PowerPivot and PowerView?

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gfunk911
Listing your pricing tiers in terms of memory makes me nervous. I have no idea
how number of rows/cells maps to memory requirements. It's completely opaque
to me.

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bradleybuda
The Fivetran team has built an awesome product - I've been using the beta to
play with some internal analytics data, and it hits a fantastic sweet spot
between Excel, SQL, and R - it's a great way to explore a large data set.

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niggler
What do you consider "large data set"? It seems to choke with over 1200 data
points (just take a simple excel sheet with A1=1,A2=2,...,A1200=1200 -- im
guessing there's a hardcoded limit somewhere)

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taylorwcbrown
Hey niggler - Taylor here from Fivetran. After 10,000 it stops rendering
additional rows to avoid crashing your browser, but the backend uses an in-
memory binary representation which is very efficient.

~~~
niggler
On Chrome 25.0.1364.172 I can only reach GR1001, even if column A is the only
column with content.

Can you put up demo projects with large datasets (one with 10K elements, one
with 100K, one with 1M, etc)? For example, you could have one set with all of
the zipcodes in the US (test for 10K) and another with the second-resolution
price data of the S&P 500 stocks for a given day (test for 1M)

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lancewiggs
Spreadsheet and sql data nut here. Signing up through Google is not the way to
earn my trust to test this out. A simple login and password feels a lot more
secure, and I would only test with that option. At least it is not Facebook.

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cwilson
The product looks and feels great, but I watched my co-founder (and CTO) get
extremely frustrated at the new user walkthrough. He was trying to get it to
stop walking him through the steps and did not succeed (he wanted to play with
it on his own, not have his hand held), resulting in him closing the site.

While I understand the value of these walk-through for people who do not spend
a lot of time in web applications (though you might argue that this is so
similar to excel that pretty much everyone is familiar with the interface),
you should strike a balance by allowing someone to easily kill the walk-
through.

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gmichnikov
Congrats on launching. I am always excited to try new tools like this. The
idea of having an intuitive way to save a series of steps in a spreadsheet
interface without having to use macros or use R is definitely appealing.

I opened the March Madness example linked to on TC. I don't really understand
how to trace what it is that has changed from one step to the next. Is there a
simple way to do that? Is there another example you would recommend to
understand how the steps work?

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nzealand
I am part of a (presumably small) minority of users who absolutely loathe dark
screens with white text.

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joez
Usability issues aside, there are no examples about sales or operating
expenses. Sales Analytics (think: product, division, type, time) are where
companies are having a ton of trouble. I would spend more time on this rather
than March Madness to acquire paying users.

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stox
Wingz, reborn yet again.

