The real power of this product is as a replacement of BI/Visualization tools. Imagine being able to connect Rows to a database and create "governed" sheets that look/work like dashboards with charts, tables, filters, etc.
It would be a killer product because most users are familiar with spreadsheets already. Many users end-up copying data from dashboards into spreadsheets (gsheet, excel, etc) so why not skipping the intermediaries and go straight to delivering a hybrid of dashboards and spreadsheets.
Thanks for the pointer, this seems really neat! Although from what I can tell it primarily provides a data interface geared towards relational databases (or other record-oriented data sources).
I played around a little and am missing actual spreadsheet functionality - like the ability to do calculations, or other manipulations that you could do on tabular data in Excel/Google Sheets (and presumably Rows). Am I missing something?
Any idea when they will have a decent implementation of forms (and maybe even subforms) with customized layouts? Last I checked it was ~on the road map.
Hi, it's Ubuntu & FF50.1. Front page works now, but sign-up is empty for me. Anyway, I understand that supporting older browsers is not an easy task... probably. So, don't mind me.
What prevents anyone from doing this in Excel/Google sheets? I've been doing Excel-based BI dashboards for 15 years, connecting to all kinds of backends. Excels have tables/charts/filters/buttons/pivots
Yes, Sheets is amazing already. It is missing integrations out of the box though which is where Rows is trying to win.
I notice this problem a while back and built Wax (https://www.wax.run/). Wax adds the features you'd want from Rows to Sheets. We handle integrations and scheduling. Also, considering a lot of internal tools leverage SQL and Python, we make using those them from Sheets simple.
As I see a couple of mentions on GRID (https://grid.is/) on this thread, I thought it might be interesting to share a little bit about how we see this space.
First of all, Rows is a fantastic tool. They are really onto something, especially in how to work get structured data out of other systems into a spreadsheet and then work with that kind of data in the "spreadsheet way" that we've all been trained in. This is a pain point of current spreadsheets and one that Rows is addressing in a really nice way.
If you think about all the things that spreadsheets are used for - which is a lot - it still generally falls into one of three categories (https://medium.grid.is/the-3-types-of-spreadsheets-3d021356c...):
1. Numbers and calculations
2. Small databases
3. Business processes
What Rows does falls mostly into the realm of small databases and business processes. And while each has their own approach, I'd say that most other "next-gen spreadsheets" are also focusing on these (big and important) use-cases. Airtable (https://airtable.com/), Spreadsheet.com (https://spreadsheet.com/) and Smartsheet (https://smartsheet.com/) all play mainly in this area.
GRID is focusing on the numbers and calculations use-case, allowing people that have already built a model or pulled together numerical data in a spreadsheet to better explore, explain and converse about them.
FileMaker is one product that does these things. It kind of languished while it was owned by Apple, and made some poor decisions. It does seem to have made a change for a better direction and I could see it making a comeback, but entry-level pricing is needed.
>The real power of this product is as a replacement of BI/Visualization tools. Imagine being able to connect Rows to a database and create "governed" sheets that look/work like dashboards with charts, tables, filters, etc.
With respect, if your BI tools look like excel, you need a better BI tool
Thanks, I gave those another try. They links didn't look inviting, expected just more of the same (text + images). But's actually an interactive demo from end-user perspective. that was easy to get: https://grid.is/@grid_templates/template-interactive-user-fu...
thank you! Yes, our goals is really to make a better spreadsheet - but simpler to use, integrated with the tools people use everyday, and 10x better to share.
Quite nice but I wonder why the scene for this kind of tools is stuck in the Spreadsheets and pipes interface. Definitely powerful, Excel itself is an amazing tool, having an "Excel" that can fetch data is 10X more powerful as we see with Google Docs or other products too.
However, using these still feels wrong for me. It seems to be simplifying some stuff but can get very complex quickly and hard to debug when you want to do something more involved. At that point, writing code gets much easier than managing ever expanding complexity of the No-Code solutions.
IMHO someone some day will crack it and programming for data processing will become a visual endeavour.
Compliments to see this thrive since 2016 with that large of a team! I had to laugh at the Berlin (ex) Rocket company logos; this age old Excel style data formatting which looks nice and custom at first glance brings back memories of inevitably ending up in swamps of versions, custom tweaks and data inaccuracies. Arguably, most of these problems can be well mitigated by a cloud hosted solution like yours!
But the audience being non-tech people, the look is pretty fantastic.
From a technical perspective:
Care to share how you do data integration (batch/ stream/ mix? All hosted hyperscaler or something like Airbyte)?
How do you address what I would think are dynamic load peaks during business days?
I don't have much of an opinion on the product, it seems fine, but I greatly enjoyed the cute little spreadsheet styling on the pricing table[1], it actually made me laugh. Good design, nice work.
Not everyone has online access 24x7: I don't have it where I live; I travel enough for work to not have it on travel about 50% of the time; I work with customers to whom we sell product, who Air-Gap their central operations for security reasons. Etc. Etc. I don't know what market was imagined but there are broad swaths that will never be accessible to you with the first design mistake of "it's convenient for US"!
Looks great, and I like that there is a lot of overlap with Grist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257521, https://www.getgrist.com (of which I am a founder). The differences are interesting: rows.com seems more focused on external integrations; Grist has API but is more focused on powerful formulas and layouts for working within the data.
I imagine the overlap will only increase. I take it as confirmation that these are good ideas to pursue.
This is the tech that may be the future of computing. All of your company's data stored, and handled, in Rows.
Or not. The chief concern is that modern data protection laws would make all columns of these tables unreadable without specific sanction. You're not free to address any cell in any table, just a pre-cleared strict subset, which no longer allows you to take advantage of easy aggregation and filtering of data.
I am not that familiar with theses new sheet like apps. Although I like them because I hate sheets/excel. But can anyone point out the main focus difference between this and Airtable?
How is this different from Airtable? Also I always wanted something that could connect directly to python in the background instead of super clunky pipeline building importing xls etc.
Try this project I work on, https://perspective.finos.org/ . It comes with a Python library (that runs the exact same engine/code as in the wasm version), and even a JupyterLab plugin. You can run the engine fully in-python, in-Javascript (via wasm), or replicated between the two.
Also comparing product to Yahoo Pipes in the original post, how many prospective customers are gonna know what that is other than a handful of us around here? haha
Thought that was funny too. The company has been around since 2016 (originally called "dashdash") and Pipes shut down in 2015, so it'd make sense as the original pitch in 2016.
If you haven't looked into it yet - Google Apps Script [0] is an incredibly powerful system when combined with Google Sheets. You can integrate lots of business processes and external systems (rest,soap,databases etc) together and integrate with classic spreadsheet functionality, we use it a lot in our business!
Yeah, I had a similar idea to Rows, but decided it'd be better to add what's missing to Sheets vs. build an entirely separate app. Wax (https://www.wax.run/) helps you build internal tools on top of Google Sheets. It's built using Apps Script and handles a ton of the boilerplate you'd want for any internal tool. Scheduling and integrations are hard to do in Apps Script, so we handle that and considering a lot of internal tools leverage SQL and Python we make using those them from Sheets simple.
App Scripts is great and together with Sheets it almost feel like a tiny functions + db serverless engine.
Having used it significantly, I found two main qualms that prevented me from investing more in the platform:
1. It is just JS syntax but the runtime and the “standard library” are completely different than node.js. For example there’s a weird UrlFetch class instead of xhr/fetch. It’s a never ending learning curve so much it feels like another language. Any async support is also non existent, that means no setTimeout, no Promise, no async/await (unless they added it recently with the move to ES6)
2. Due to 1, the library ecosystem is very limited. A library in GAS is just another GAS script that you import by referencing its ID (the long one in the URL).
Scripts can be public so you can import other people’s code. However no npm, no lodash and friends.
You can dev locally using clasp, so you can use git/npm/.., and package your code with webpack or something so it runs on GAS. However this only works for npm libs that do not depend on the usual JS environment and APIs. Lodash will work, anything network related won’t for example.
All in all Google App Script is more of a hassle than it’s worth so I only use it in specific cases, but I wish for a similarly accessible sheet+code environment that can also serve HTML, just with a better JS runtime.
Oh and don’t get me started on the development/deployment lifecycle.
I've been working with this for a while and I find it frustrating slow and unreliable. Especially working with an HTTP listener. Does anyone have better experience/advice?
Yes, don’t use GAS if you have the possibility to avoid it.
Otherwise, do the heavy lifting somewhere else and use GAS as a very basic wrapper for your sheet.
One pattern that worked well for us in the past is to use Firebase functions (or Google Cloud Run) and leave the scripts to act as a dumb API to interact with the sheet.
Is there a solution to version control/deterministically see/deploy active scripts? How do you manage all the scripts? I've used it to compile/summarize spreadsheets and serve as a simple endpoint (testing webhooks), but not much more.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It would be a killer product because most users are familiar with spreadsheets already. Many users end-up copying data from dashboards into spreadsheets (gsheet, excel, etc) so why not skipping the intermediaries and go straight to delivering a hybrid of dashboards and spreadsheets.
Lots of potential.