Comment by didgetmaster
5 hours ago
Creating interactive pivot tables from large relational tables.
Many people know that a handy data analysis feature in Excel is to create a pivot table from a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets are limited to just a million rows. You can get around this limit by jumping through a bunch of hoops.
My system lets you easily create tables with thousands of columns and hundreds of millions of rows. (Just drop a CSV, Json, or other file on a window to create a table.)
Now you can create a pivot table from it with just a few clicks of the mouse. It is fast (I created a pivot table against an 8.5 million row table of Chicago crime data in less than a second.)
The resulting pivot table is interactive. Each cell (row/column intersection) has all the row keys mapped to it. Double-click on any cell and it will instantly show you all the rows in the original table that were used to calculate the cell. You can then analyze those rows further.
It also works well against much larger tables. I have tested it out against 25M, 50M, 100M, and 200M+ row tables.
How are you planning to sell it given the market dominance of Excel? The people that would be most willing to pay for spreadsheets are also the people who are already paying for Excel.
Not trying to discourage you, I am curious as to see how you are planning to enter the market as that was something I couldn’t answer when considering working on spreadsheet tools of various kinds or even an excel alternative.
If your dataset is small enough to fit in an Excel spreadsheet, then you probably are not looking for an alternative.
But if your dataset has millions of rows and you need something quick to help you slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to try and find valuable insights in it to drive business decisions; then maybe you are looking for something better.
BTW: creating pivot tables is just one of dozens of things my system can do. I am currently trying to figure out which features will attract the most customers.