Hey! As some of you may know already, I’ve been working on a new type of spreadsheet. Recently we just shipped persisting data blocks that can be filtered along with the ability to choose a emoji and color for the spreadsheet. While small features, it really made spreadsheets a a lot more fun (for me at least)! Here’s a mini example of a data sheet of grades filtered by “good grades” and “bad grades.”

I'm actually not so interested in the emoji's or colors. I think you are right that it makes things more "fun" though. I'm more focused on just seeing these things side-by-side in one space. I don't work with a ton of spreadsheets but I find the shifting between tabs as they get more complicated to be annoying. A lot of software has this property and usually falls back on the OS's window layout to deal with it. For example, in Google Sheets you can have multiple browser tabs for different pages or in IDEs you can open tabs for different code files. It seems like you can get a much better user experience with a layout engine focused on the matter at hand though. For a coding analogy this kinda reminds me of some of the original Light Table videos where functions were treated as the unit to display in a window rather than files (though I think that project eventually trended in a different direction and then became abandoned or slowed down significantly).

I’m glad you noticed that! It was really important for us to build it in a way where you can see relationships between tabs. For example, I used to basically have to memorize what formulas like =SUM(‘TAB1’!B:B) was actually referencing to in another tab. I know what we’ve built so far is not perfect, so I’m curious in the spreadsheet work you do. Anything we can add or include here to make it better for use cases like yours?

My use cases are so basic that I don't think I'd be inclined to use this tool. It isn't a problem with the tool its just that I'm more inclined to use whatever I have easiest access to (google sheets) and ignore all shortcomings. I'm a dev, we put schedules in excel but that use case is more like a 2D-text document than anything mathematical. I've occasionally done simple formulas in excel sheets but its rare that I have work spanning multiple sheets. I encounter issues with the work spanning multiple sheets but I'm not in the sheets enough to care about a solution. I suspect less than 1% of my job is done in sheets like this. I imagine that something like this would be more useful for folks using sheets all the time and encountering that tab issue and having to remember context across sheets on a daily or even hourly basis.

ah that totally makes sense and thanks for the input! we’re really focused on doing number crunching better than other spreadsheet apps (things notion, airtable, sheets can’t do). obviously with spreadsheets you can do anything, including 2D-text documents, so from that aspect, we’re just making it more beautiful and fun to use, hence the colors and emojis, but its a very small part

Hi @Jason Chan! I would love to chat with you about this (do you have a calendly or something? feel free to email me breck7@gmail.com). I built a new kind of spreadsheet for Our World in Data (). (source code is available at https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher ). And it's still my favorite data science tool I use for my personal stuff (it's open source and anyone can use though it's not really being promoted outside of OWID). But it's hard work and I've moved on to other projects so I would love to find a similar tool that meets my needs.

I really like that POV "Breck" I've once heard coding described to some nontechnical folks as, "spreadsheets without columns".

Hey Breck! I’d love to chat 😄 https://calendly.com/jason-subset/30min

Scheduled! Looking forward to it!

Super excited!

Cool to see new takes on spreadsheets! I've recently worked on a project to make spreadsheets more dynamic. It's not very graphical (although I suppose it could be made graphical). It's more of a bespoke argument-less language capturing the spirit of data transforms that you'd see in spreadsheets. It primarily adds a way to use external data sources and publish data, link. Might be inspirational :)

Super cool! @Ahmad Sattar would love to chat if you’re free one of these days

@Breck Yunits, aspects of your system reminds me of Cuscus: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-24781-2_8

thanks @James Scott-Brown (https://github.com/breck7/pldb/issues/134)