intro · Apr 11, 2018

Why we spent 10 years to create another web spreadsheet

Henri Chen
Founder of Keikai.

My helpful screenshot

Keikai - けいかい 【軽快】 - Nimble, and Mighty.

Hi, I am Henri, founder of Keikai.

It has been more than 40 years since the first spreadsheet was invented. As time goes by, spreadsheet has been invented, reinvented, dropped, picked up and put online. Even on our mobile devices.

In the face of all these efforts, there is a group of people out there still trying, pushing it to go beyond its limits.

Yes, that is us.

Since the early 2000s, we have committed ourselves to web spreadsheet. In 2008, we saw our very first web spreadsheet ZK Spreadsheet went online. It is loved by numerous users worldwide, especially in finance, technology and research. Our customers include Citigroup, Seagate, Adobe, Nokia, USC, just to name a few.

However, this did not stop us striving for excellence.

Spreadsheet for Big Data

In the past decade, we have never stopped exploring web spreadsheet.

For years, we have kept improving our ZK Spreadsheet to accommodate users’ needs. Though we have boosted its performance 10x, but as we live in an age where it is difficult to keep up with data that grows exponentially, it is not just about evolutionizing spreadsheet anymore, but revolutionizing it. For now, and the future.

To settle it once and for all, two years ago, our team redesigned spreadsheet from head to toe. It was nights after nights of pushing ourselves and sending us back to square one over and over again, that led us where we are today.

Now, having successfully exceeded the size and speed limits of web spreadsheet, we are more than happy to present Keikai — the only web spreadsheet for big data.

Keikai’s Architecture

Built with the most innovative technologies, Keikai has made a breakthrough in terms of size and speed.

To speed up loading and viewing, we transfer the required and yet minimal set of data to the client first. As the data is being loaded, you can start viewing and editing it right away.

To further boost the performance, we invented a super light-weight structure to stream data on the fly. This structure also reduces memory footprints, and saves server-side resource.

On the client side, we gave up conventional HTML tables or DIVs and invented a frame-based rendering engine. With such, Keikai can minimize the generated DOM, upgrade the browser performance, and guarantee reasonable response time by skipping unchanged bits and pieces and only updating the latest changes. Even if you are running on slow machines.

This also makes it possible to render literally anything you want: diagonals, dashed borders, fractions, double-sided alignment, angled texts and more, without being limited by HTML syntax.

In addition to supporting big data, Keikai provides the most complete feature sets that are required for today’s enterprises.

Unlike conventional ad-hoc, Keikai is employed with the most powerful BNF (Backus–Naur form) parser that successfully parses up to 99.99% of the sampled one million Excel formulas. It also supports 400+ formulas and 800+ locale, not to mention the commonly used editing, sorting, filtering, charting, conditional formatting, validation, sheet/cell protection, etc.

Keikai is made ready for all devices, including PC, Mac, Android and iOS. You and your team can collaborate anywhere, anytime, and on any devices.

Start Your Journey with Keikai

With all the efforts we have put in, we can now proudly announce KeiKai. Unlike any web spreadsheet, it is designed and architected for big data — and is the fastest web spreadsheet regardless of size!

You are more than welcome to leave any comment below, or contact us at info@keikai.io.