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Accelerate Excel – 100x faster spreadsheets

by vj44 on 7/31/14, 5:13 PM with 46 comments

• by seestheday on 7/31/14, 5:38 PM

  This is really cool, and I have to say I'm impressed, but is excel speed a common problem for people?

  Are you trying to monetize this? Who is your target market? I'm genuinely curious.

  I work at $BIGCORP in analytics with a lot of large excel spreadsheets every day. If I bump up against row limits or need functionality not available in excel I'll import into a corporate oracle db and manipulate it with SQL. A lot of the people that I collaborate with can only use Excel and it's often faster to just manipulate data there rather than put it into a real db or parse it with another tool.

  With modern computers I can tell you it is a very rare occurrence that I cause excel to choke. On the order of once a quarter.

• by minimaxir on 7/31/14, 5:21 PM

  > We've rewritten Excel's computational engine from scratch. Our hand-optimized code blows Excel's native engine out of the water.

  Does the rewrite incorporate all of Excel's important native functions? (e.g. the ones that would most likely be used with 10^5 rows of data)

• by JonoBB on 7/31/14, 5:24 PM

  I used to write spreadsheets that were 50mb and sometimes took a few minutes to compute (native computational stuff, not macros and not circular references).

  I'd be very interested to know some generalised (non-IP) background on how you've achieved this speed increase.

  Also, under what circumstances is this speed increase achievable? How have you measured the 100x?

• by kfk on 7/31/14, 5:52 PM

  I see you guys have you been exploring the spreadsheet world for a while. Have you had a look at financials consolidations? The de facto software for this is Hyperion and it is terrible. Also, nothing I know of allows to build complex web reports. Another "consolidation" tool is BPC, which is another nightmare to maintain. Everything I am using in my controlling job makes you waste literally days a month due to bad implemented UI, functionalities and overall slowness (even business objects/hana is not that fast...).

• by joez on 7/31/14, 10:29 PM

  I am a heavy heavy Excel user. I use it to help run a large startup.

  100x faster would be a huge win. There's always a tradeoff between design/human cycles and speed. You could even think of it as Excel technical debt. Legacy spreadsheets never get rebuilt/re-engineered because of a lack of human time. That's a large cause of spreadsheets that become unmanageable.

  2 questions around this: - How do we know the data is secure? (the IT team will want to know this for sure) - How do we know the computations are correct?

• by TheAlchemist on 7/31/14, 5:55 PM

  Could you please post some benchmarks ? I'm really curious

• by SeanDav on 7/31/14, 5:56 PM

  If it is not proprietary, please explain how you force Excel to use your computation engine, rather than its own internal one?

• by kalleth on 7/31/14, 6:49 PM

  This looks really cool.

  My mum (not me, unfortunately for you!) works in Accountancy and the entire industry is spreadsheet-driven. IT bods on HN might not realise this, but the accounting department of nearly every BigCo that isn't a development firm basically relies entirely on Excel.

  I've already signed up (tom at cishub dot co dot uk) but the key point here for me is how easy it's going to be for her -- a non-technical accountant, but excel expert -- to integrate it with her existing spreadsheets.

  Also, wether it'll require modifying existing spreadsheets and/or ways of working to take advantage.

  Definitely one to watch, could be a ridiculous moneyspinner if you get it right.

• by infogulch on 7/31/14, 6:59 PM

  How much creative potential do you have? Are you limited to Excel types or could you extend it arbitrarily?

  VBA is a kludge, but I've always thought that spreadsheets might be an interesting programming environment if you were restricted to the native functionality with a small addition. Namely, add a new value type: "anonymous function," which consists of parameters with an excel-native body, which can be assigned to a cell. You could then call the function by referring to the cell it's stored in (or any other way you can get a reference to it) and passing parameters. Function naming would work by using named ranges.

• by nhebb on 7/31/14, 5:40 PM

  Where does DataNitro run - is it an add-in, is it a desktop program that operates on external Excel files, or are the files uploaded to, and processed on your site? If it's an add-in, is it Windows-only (COM)?

• by bhouston on 7/31/14, 5:37 PM

  Cool. Limited exit strategy though - you either sell to Microsoft or else what? I guess if the price is reasonable it makes sense.

• by Nicholas_C on 7/31/14, 9:49 PM

  I'm sitting here waiting on a spreadsheet to calculate so this interests me greatly.

  However, I will say that if your spreadsheets aren't calculating then you're probably not using the proper tool for the job. I've inherited the ones I'm using and hope to simplify them as soon as I can figure out exactly what they're doing.

• by pmalynin on 7/31/14, 5:47 PM

  I'd more interested in seeing a CUDA implementation. If they were able to get 100x baseline on the CPU, I'd expect the GPU implementation to be at least 1000x baseline as most tasks are "infinitely" parallelizable (row additions, multiplication etc.)

• by dammitcoetzee on 7/31/14, 5:53 PM

  I want this, I've been wanting this for the past four releases of Excel. Excel is a great tool for engineers. It gets the subpar results fast, while code, matlab, and DBs get's the fantastic results slow, which I hardly ever need.

• by SeanDav on 7/31/14, 6:08 PM

  Excel had major issues with statistical calculations prior to Excel 2010. Post 2010 there are still a few issues. Have you taken this into account and corrected any, or just duplicated the behaviour, or some other method?

• by SchizoDuckie on 8/5/14, 7:30 AM

  Kudo's on the speed up, but can you guarantee that the calculations are bug-free ?

• by jaxn on 7/31/14, 6:27 PM

  Once again, Excel users on the Mac are unable to get all of the cool toys.

• by gaius on 7/31/14, 8:51 PM

  Hopefully this will be the nail in the coffin of "big data".

• by trapezoid on 7/31/14, 5:17 PM

  What's this written in?

• by dang on 7/31/14, 5:35 PM

  We took "Show HN" out of the title because "Show HN" is for things that people can try out now: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

• by TD-Linux on 7/31/14, 5:23 PM

  No source code? How are we supposed to make any use of this? What is the point of an email signup?