Comment by emeril | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emeril | Hacker News Reader

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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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