Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

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We have a super fast iteration cycle, so most times a user asks us for a feature parity thing like this, we can ship it within 24 hours. This particular one might be slow for us, a few days :)

If we waited until we had full Excel parity, we would never ship. Google Sheets has been around for 17 years and still doesn't have full Excel parity on features or functions, and that's with dozens of engineers working on it full time.

Luckily now that we are launched we have a bunch of very knowledgable people like you requesting all these features, and this gives us a really good signal for prioritization.

E.g. a bunch of other people also requested the alt-shortcuts, so they are pretty high priority

Highest priority are the bugs like jkaptur pointed out above, and some other people had some crazy CSV files that we couldn't parse. So I'll fix those today and get to the copy-paste-formula-to-range thing in the next day or two. Alt shortcuts is very high on our frontend guy's list.

I wish you luck, I can definitely appreciate the difficulty in trying to achieving some degree of excel feature parity

I had come across this copy to more than one cell issue when I was curious to see the performance myself in making some random numbers and doing some look-ups based on those results which I couldn't do en masse due to this limitation

a few other things to think about implementing

(1) some more formatting/font/point size options

(2) customizable number formatting like excel

(3) functions like hlookup, edate, perhaps even array function like functionality (i.e., a relatively powerful and open ended underused feature in excel due to a combination of difficulty in understanding as well as being very slow calculation-wise)

(4) some minimal vector drawing abilities

(5) it doesn't bother me and it's part of your marketing but starting with "0" may confuse some people (and would break excel compatibility) since excel doesn't do that (though I appreciate indices/etc. do that in "real" programming)

(6) filtering data doesn't include a "contain" or "does not contain" option

(7) perhaps some limited ability to customize the interface and have user defined keyboard shortcuts triggering formatting/etc. type macros/python

(8) some sort of print/formatting to yield output to pdf

Thank you for all the feedback!

1. Our frontend guy has been dreading this but it is high on the list nonetheless :)

2. Somewhat lower down the list but we have heard this before too

3. I have array functionality on a branch, still ironing out some rough edges, might be a month or two before we land it for real. We can add those builtins hlookup & edate very quickly.

4. We haven't heard anyone request vector drawing before. Can you elaborate on the use case? Sounds interesting.

5. Re: Row 0, we have funnily heard a lot of Excel people always wanted it, because they tend to have headers at the top, and it always bothered them referring to their data starting at A2 instead of A1. It's not a compatibility issue for import from Excel, because we just import all the data starting at A1. It can be a problem for export to Excel (which we don't have yet, but will), but we will just shift everything down by 1 row as if you had done a giant cut-paste.

6. For string types we have "contains" but we don't have "does not contain", will add it. Excel allows you to do "contains" on number types too which we thought nobody actually wanted, but if you do want it, we can add it. There are some performance implications to this because it means you have to convert numbers to strings to do the check.

7. More customization is probably farther down the line when we grow more.

8. Yes, right now we can only output to CSV. We have had some people talk about how they want to output to Powerpoint slides, PDF, etc. This is definitely on our radar.

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