We moved from Google Sheets to use a "fancy spreadsheet" product and the missing table stakes were a lot more painful than the benefits of the fancy features.
Turns out Google Sheets has solved a lot of corner cases that we took for granted.
Navigating using the keyboard, drag/drop for reordering rows/columns (in a way that wasn't painful), conditional formatting on ranges of cells.
At the end of the day, we actually didn't want or need the rigid structure we thought we did .... or at least it wasn't worth giving up the polish of Sheets.
it’s not clear to me if that comparison is with Rows or another product
Rows is built to be as flexible as any other spreadsheet
- You can add whatever you want in a cell, literals, formulas, we even support json as a primitive type.
- we got the same formulas vlookup sum sumifs filter query, plus hundreds new ones like get, put, post, schedule, expand
- we got conditional formatting (not as powerful as sheets, we will get there).
- we we got shortcuts, above it all ctrl-k/ Cmd-k, but also many block navigation ones (ctrl+arrow, Cmd+arrow), excel windows compatible shortcuts (f2/f4), and a bunch of others.
Anything in particular you think is a dealbreaker for you?
My feedback isn't specific to Rows. The dealbreaker for us was post-evaluation. On paper, the alternative option looked preferable but it wasn't until we started using it that the friction became problematic.
The only suggestion I have is to closely watch standard interactions that users coming from a traditional spreadsheet have.
Rows looks great and I hope my post didn't come off wrong. The issues I had may (or may not) be applicable to Rows. I appreciate your willingness to listen.
I usually try to refrain from posting negative comments, but start of that product video was a bit annoying to watch. Are you trying to showcase your product or to make an animation fitting a cool song you just found?
(Maybe it is intentional, it made me post this comment after all :).
We have tried many videos. Our team has full discretion (the way to do it) so I wasn't involved directly.
AFAIK the purpose is to excite the target users (marketing managers, operations, business managers) to the potential. We have done other videos with other stories.
Your point is that we should be more intentional in the story? slower? How would you approach a video about a spreadsheet?
I often wonder about products like this. It seems to me that access solved many of these problems years ago then just faded away. I don't know why, I don't know why these are better either. Other than being collaborative and in the cloud. Those are huge benefits but why didn't access carry on to the cloud?
I feel like I'm missing some understanding of the low code space.
I'd like to learn these tools one day to allow me to rapidly put together CRUD apps but every CRUD app I build seems to have some edge case that would not be a good fit. So I carry on the old fashioned way. I'm sure I'm wasting time manually plumbing data between the database and the front end but oh well.
I have a theory that SQL Server made so much cash that Microsoft didn’t want Access to eat its lunch. It could have made a lot of progress in the last 25 years even with a reasonably small team.
Honestly something that could start as a local Access file and later be “hosted” on-premises for collaborative usage and later move to (e.g. Microsoft’s) cloud for wider usage/easy hosting would be useful to a lot of folk. The forms etc could migrate to HTML (rendered via local webviews / websites on a users browser).
Rows isn’t for apps. It’s for spreadsheets proper.
Just that Rows assumes 2 things:
1. you got to import data from your cloud tools (SaaS like GoogleAnalytics, BigQuery, Looker, Ads platforms,… and your own custom APIs). It’s hard to do on excel and sheets, not flexible and hard to automate.
2. You want to share spreadsheets in a way they render well on mobile.
You guys are completely hosed I’m afraid, tomorrow I’m unveiling my competing project ‘columns 3.0’. We would have beat you to market but we’re big fans of late materialization.
I'm sorry but you have to improve on the very first example that you are using to showcase your stuff. What is a graph supposed to tell me where the X axis goes from pages per session to avg time per page? Why are there continuous lines connecting quantities that somehow seem to change units?!
At this point, can all new "super spreadsheet" products please come with a standardised proforma comparing them to the other 50 super spreadsheet apps along a set of standardised comparison points please?
I genuinely do not have the time to compare between this, air table, Monday.com, smart sheet, etc etc etc
I hear you, but you know it is not much different than the variety of programming languages or frameworks we are used to. I think there is still a huge market for new spreadsheet apps. Some will succeed and most will not.
At this point my hot favorite ones I would like to learn more about are grid.is, rows.com and equals.com. But I am sure there are tons I don't know
I get your point, but at least they don't expect me to pay them money for the privilege of finding out what they actually do (assuming we're talking open source ones).
Python’s pandas. Or Apache Arrow (more data structure, but with some calc capabilities). Granted, they’re not spreadsheets per se. Rather, they’re dataframe-centric programming.
I just won't take any spreadsheet app really seriously until someone comes anywhere near the Excel table object (which is queryable with the built-in Power BI!).
I do think Google Sheets actually is much more pleasant to use than Excel, especially given the collaboration feature, but once you start getting fancy with Excel Query Pivot Tables anyone who's not an actual full-time developer starts salivating.
Really cool promo video. I'm not sure what is particularly unique compared to what we now have in tools like Coda and such. Maybe more spreadsheet-focused than the others?
Amazing spreadsheet tech!
Big fan since the days of dashdash. Anyone interested in new applications of good old spreadsheets I recommend getting and account and trying it out
Turns out Google Sheets has solved a lot of corner cases that we took for granted.