I enjoyed your demo video and played around with a CSV of my own. This is a cool project, but I have a (perhaps stupid) question:
Why should I use this tool over Excel or Google Sheets?
I don't mean this question to be a challenge. Just trying to understand which sorts of tasks would I be better off using Pretzel as opposed to a traditional spreadsheet tool.
Hey, absolutely - that's a perfectly fair question. I can give you my personal reasons:
- I don't have excel on a Mac so I need to use Google Sheets. Google Sheets crashes on any file over 30-40 MB (at least on my macbook air)
- I think this type of chained data transform is a much better (more code-like?) way of doing transforms. You can see exactly how you got to your end-result. Vs, for example, in Google Sheets, you're modifying data in-place and your transform history is only accessible via Undo and Redo. This is far more reproducible short of using a python script.
(I've worked as a data scientist for a while and I suppose that influences how I think about chained data transforms vs the in-place Excel way too!)
But this is just for now - the long term vision is: Being able to easily switch between visual no-code blocks, SQL and Python in the same browser-local "notebook"/"workbook" that's easily shareable. I think it doesn't take much convincing that such a tool would be more powerful than Excel for certain workflows!
Why should I use this tool over Excel or Google Sheets?
I don't mean this question to be a challenge. Just trying to understand which sorts of tasks would I be better off using Pretzel as opposed to a traditional spreadsheet tool.