Product Updates - September 7, 2020

Today we’re excited to announce the release of several new features and enhancements we’ve been busy working on for the past few months, with more to come over the next few weeks:

  • Cut, Copy, and Paste 2.0

  • Export to Excel (beta)

  • Table Header Row Enhancements

  • Formula Bar Editor Enhancements

  • Formula Calculation Progress Bar

  • Customizable Checkbox Colors

In addition to these improvements, we’ve also included over 66 bug fixes in today’s release. Some highlights below.


Cut, Copy, and Paste 2.0

We’ve completely rewritten how cut, copy, and paste operations work in Spreadsheet.com, including how Spreadsheet.com data is stored in the clipboard. Now all data types, styling, and formulas can be cut or copied as-is from one worksheet to another, even across workbooks in different browser windows. Data in attachment cells, related row cells, collaborator cells, etc. is preserved.

Pasting data into a Spreadsheet.com worksheet from other spreadsheet applications (e.g. Excel, Google Sheets) and external applications (e.g. web browsers, word processors) has been substantially improved, with pasted data automatically converted to target data types. Formatting and styling is also maintained where possible.

In addition, copying and pasting data from Spreadsheet.com to other spreadsheets and applications has been substantially improved, with rich data type values replaced by human readable text where applicable.

We’ve also added a “paste values only” option that appears after a paste operation is completed, providing an option to remove copied styles and data types from the paste operation, similar to the behavior of traditional spreadsheet applications.

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Export to Excel (beta)

Workbooks can now be exported to Excel (an XLSX file) by selecting the “Export to Excel” option in the File menu. This is a work in progress in high demand by early Spreadsheet.com users, so we’ve decided to launch this feature in its current beta state. Please let us know if you run into issues with an exported file and we will prioritize a fix.

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Cells with data types that have no equivalent in Excel (e.g. Attachments, Related rows, Collaborators, etc.) will be converted to the closest human readable text equivalent value.


Table Header Row Enhancements

After observing over 100 users interacting with the table header row, we’ve added context menus to table header row cells to make this feature more intuitive and behave similar to table headers in traditional spreadsheet applications. The new context menu provides faster access to sorting, filtering, and changing column data types, among other things.


Formula Bar Editor Enhancements

It’s been a surprise to us how many people use the formula bar to view and edit formulas rather than the in-cell formula editor. We’re excited to now bring this same experience to the formula bar.


Formula Calculation Progress Bar

We’ve added a formula calculation progress bar to make it clear when the formula engine is busy calculating. Often in worksheets with large numbers of formulas, worksheets may appear slow to respond when the worksheet is first loaded because the formula engine is busy. The new formula calculation progress bar provides a visual indication when this is happening.

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Customizable Checkbox Colors

Checkbox cells now adopt the foreground color applied to the cell, allowing you to choose any color for your checkboxes as easily as changing the color of text.

CheckboxColors


66 bug fixes, including:

  • 002045 : Updated At and Updated By cells no longer change when a change to the cell’s data type settings are made, eliminating confusion when a row is actually updated.

  • 002022 : Fixed an issue whereby formula errors like #VALUE in the hierarchy function evaluation flow may break formula computations

  • 001778 : Corrections to undo/redo operations on parent rows in hierarchies

  • 002044 : Fixed an issue whereby deleting a row in a sorted view and switching to another view might cause issues with existing formulas

  • 002979 : The ROW() function now returns a value based on the visual row header index number.

  • 002089 & 002098 : Added validation to ensure merge cells cannot be part of a sorted or filtered table region.

  • 002126 : Fixed an issue whereby deleting multiple rows may result in a workbook out of sync message.

  • 001879 : Converting a column to Collaborator is now performs a case-insensitive searching for matches (formerly this was case sensitive)

  • 001188 : Increased resolution of wide attachment thumbnails to reduce blurryness

Awesome! These are some significant UI improvements and I like all of them.

The Copy/Cut/Paste update is a really big one. It’s working well for what I’ve needed to do so far. I’d still like an easy way to drag rows to move them, and a way to duplicate a worksheet, but at least now the copy/cut/paste makes this possible to do without recreating a similar worksheet from scratch.

Formula Bar: I’m one of the people who like to use the Formula bar to edit long formulas, so this is great improvement. Using the arrow keys to scroll up/down within the formula is sufficient for now. One suggestion would be to show a portion of the second line so that you can see if a formula is more than one row, like this:

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Formula Calculation Progress Bar: This definitely helps. Suggestion: It would be nice if the motion of the progress bar would repeat so there was constant motion while the calculation was still in progress.

Checkbox colors may not be the most important thing in the world, but I like it. :smile:

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Thanks for this feedback and great to hear Copy/Cut/Paste is working well for you! Following up on your suggestions:

  • Row movement (i.e. ability to drag rows to move them) is a core feature on our roadmap.

  • We are planning to make the formula bar expandable, allowing you to see many lines at of formula text at once. As part of this we may consider tightening up the line spacing to achieve the effect you mentioned here.

  • Regarding the motion of the formula calculation progress bar, this will be improved as part of a broader set of UI updates we have planned.

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We may enable resizing of Formula Bar to edit longish formulas and text.
Formula Calculation Progress Bar : I’m of the opinion that is should be restyled to be like more plain ‘infinite progress bar’

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