Meet Humberto Ayres Pereira, Founder and CEO at Spreadsheet Data Company: Rows

The world runs on spreadsheets. They are essential for any business. Even privately, we use them to track personal investments and build family budgets.

But the existing spreadsheets were invented for a pre-iPhone and pre-Cloud-APIs world. They have dated designs. They’re error-prone when sharing data – it’s far too easy to accidentally delete things. What’s more, they are isolated from other tools; getting data into them is a time-consuming process.

At Rows we reinvented spreadsheets to let people access data they need directly from a spreadsheet that also looks modern and is collaboration-friendly.

Rows has cells and all the functions you’re used to, just like Google Sheets and Excel. But on top of that, we added powerful integrations with business tools and public databases. Your spreadsheet can talk to Google Analytics, Twitter, Stripe, and Salesforce; it can send emails, Slack alerts; and even connect to your custom APIs. You can also fetch public data from databases like LinkedIn, Hunter or Google Maps.

Rows offers Live sharing, too – a revolutionary new feature for spreadsheets. Users with live access only see the data you want, and can only edit cells you set as editable. In other words, no one can mess up your spreadsheets. They can now easily be turned into interactive dashboards, reports and forms with buttons, input fields and checkboxes too. Plus, they look great on mobile.

Our built-in integrations with business tools and live sharing is easily the biggest rethink of spreadsheets since Google Sheets.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
When Torben (my co-founder) and I worked together on our previous venture, we used spreadsheets extensively and were astonished at how much they are stuck in the past.

So, when we moved onto creating our next startup, we quickly arrived at the idea of a modern spreadsheet. A next generation powerful spreadsheet, integrated with modern tools, where teams could be more productive and collaborate with ease.
 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Building a feature-rich, multiple use case product like spreadsheets is a long process. We wanted to make sure that Rows remains a true spreadsheet with functions and formulas as users already know them. This meant catching up with traditional spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets, which have been in the making for decades. So, we focused on building towards a feature parity where it matters, while innovating and adding features needed for modern teams, such as built-in integrations.

We now support the majority of features that everyday spreadsheet users use and our unique features have been simplified to be accessible to a wide range of users. Now, you don’t need to speak JSON to easily get data you need from Twitter, Google Analytics, Stripe, or any other integration. We also recently launched Rows native desktop apps for MacOS and Microsoft, and we’re seeing them gaining traction fast.
 

What can we hope to see from Rows in the future?

 
Our roadmap for this year is filled with exciting new features, including a few spreadsheet favorites – Conditional formatting, Freeze panes, Version History – unique innovations with a new data explorer and a custom function builder. We’ll continue making our desktop apps more powerful and work on building an iPad app. Finally, we’re also adding plenty of new integrations with services like TikTok, Shopify, and many others.