Better spreadsheet design

Formatting can be one of the most time consuming and least productive activities of building a spreadsheet. If you wanted to save time, you’d need to learn keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Alt+HBO a million times. If you’re not a power user, then you’re definitely spending too much time on formatting and I feel your pain, or… your spreadsheet doesn’t look great.

We shouldn’t need to spend hours keeping our spreadsheets formatted! This is one of the reasons we built Subset. We wanted a spreadsheet that enables better design, by default. After working with spreadsheets for years, we developed an intuition for how they should look, feel, and work, and we’ve built thousands of these small decisions into Subset.

If you’ve ever spent too much time trying to format a spreadsheet, let us know and we’ll see if we can eliminate it!

Here’s a few of our favorite small but big design improvements in Subset

• Tables should have uniform names and clear outlines
• Columns should always be named
• Tabs shouldn’t hide information
• Large tables shouldn’t to take up the entire screen
• Coloring or resizing an entire row or column shouldn’t bleed into other tables
• Borders should adapt to adding or removing rows
• Moving data around on the screen shouldn’t break anything
• Totals and other summary statistics should be clearly separated from any table data
• Inputs to models should be clearly labeled and extracted instead of hard coded

A refreshed sidebar

We moved files to a collapsible sidebar and moved the toolbar to the left side of the canvas. The goal is to get controls out of the way and allow you to focus more on your canvas and spreadsheets. Thank you to those who helped prototype designs for this! Let us know what you think.

Other fixes and improvements

• Performance improvements with autofills, filters, and formulas
• Fixed an issue with copying and pasting data from filter blocks
• Fixed an issue with exporting blocks in sections
• Fixed an issue with exporting block names that are too long
• Fixed an issue with exporting .xlsx not returning values
• Fixed an issue with multiple row and column selection via keyboard
• Fixed a bug with an idle tab
• Fixed an issue with dragging rows
• Fixed an issue with converting a row to column headers
• Fixed an issue with text alignment and underline
• Fix an issue with the drop-zone for importing
• Fixed an issue with deleting non-continuous rows and columns
• Tooltips should disappear after clicking a button
• Fixed an issue with shift + scroll and panning
• Column names can now be formatted and can inherit cell formats
• Improved the pixel clarity of sheets when zoomed in
• Fixed a broken link in our community
• Improvements in paste for HTML tables
• Fixed an issue with the chart data dropdown