Hi Namraj! I am an equity research analyst covering multiple sectors so excel is close to water and air to me as I have to compile large data sets on it, 24/7. I think one of the reasons that people complain about excel is that they are not familiar with the functionalities it offers...as an avid user, I think what I expect from a superhuman excel are:
1) Easy-to-deploy macros for shortcut creations
2) Faster speed to load large financial models

TEMPLATES is a big one for me. I spent a decent portion of my time recycling existing sheets.
Its funny that everything i ever do in excel probably millions of people have done it before and have done it better .
Like imagine i want to generate a discounted cash flow model, i hit "/" then discounted cash flow then using a few extra questions the superhuman excel generates the skeleton of the shit i need

Strong keyboard shortcut focus, and a CMD+K style command palette search tool to find formulas, chart options, data sources, and more.

Spreadsheets are actually fairly hard to navigate with only the keyboard; off the top of my head, I wouldn't know how to switch to a different sheet's tab in Google Sheets without clicking on the tab. And discovering formulas can often be difficult if you don't know the formula name to type it in autocomplete. Same with charts: Typically I want a specific chart where I know its name, but don't want to click through menus to find it visually. A command palette could speed up discovery.

And while Google Sheets already has some deeper web data integrations with say being able to call Google Finance and Google Translate via functions (with more via add-ons from 3rd parties), could be interesting to see more data sources, again searchable via a command palette.

Very exciting, can't wait to try out your app once it's ready for testing!

Quick powerful filters in 1-2 mouse clicks like Airtable!

I agree with @kimpma126 and @maguay: there are three fundamental features you need to nail:
1) easy to use keyboard shortcuts. This should accomplish the top ~10 most common tasks (navigating, creating simple formulas, etc)
2) a cmd+k style action bar with all the options to keep your hands on the keyboard.
3) Insanely great and fast to use macros. I think of these like "snippets" in the Superhuman world.

Function parity with Excel (and probably G Sheets as well).

When I moved from Win to Mac some 10 years ago, I lost all my shortcuts and was unproductive for a week. I'd love for you to make good use of the shortcut menu SH was introducing. It's popping up in a multitude of applications (saw it in Pitch a Power Point replacement tool last week). The ability to not use the mouse except for in rare cases would be the thing for me.

That said, the difficult thing will probably not be figuring the new UI, but rather building the spreadsheet engine and making sure the outcome of functions from YOUR tool match those that Excel delivers.

There are probably some things in the methods available in Pandas dataframes that would be useful via keyboard shortcuts within spreadsheets.

describe and value_counts come to mind as examples that are single steps in python that require multiple clicks to answer in Google Sheets (I haven’t used Excel on the desktop in several years so this might be easier there).

Another thought: One thing I regularly do in Sheets is a quick validation/reconciliation workflow that looks like this:
- import source of truth data into a tab
- import new thing (that I want to validate) into another tab
- count the number of objects in source of truth that are present in validation tab
- then filter to show missing records as a launching point for troubleshooting the process that generates the second set of data

“Easy-to-deploy macros for shortcut creation” as @kimpmal126 mentions would be an excellent tool — this and similarly repetitive workflows are just different enough that writing/managing scripts/macros is a little too cumbersome, but lightweight shortcut creation would be helpful.

Would people pay for a Superhuman for Google Sheets, vs a Superhuman for Excel?

Would love to see what you put together here. I'm a daily user of excel in the financial services space.

Here are some things I'd like excel to do better:
-better guide to show how new visualization and BI tools can be used natively in Excel. Power BI is something not nearly enough excel users are onboarded with and likely don't even know where to begin with it.

-better integration between separate excel sheets, or at least easier to trace/track, especially if files are moved around

-easier way to format text and numbers. It's not straightforward when doing custom formatting (with all the spaces, semi colons, dashes etc)

Hi Namra! I'm a Product Manager and what you're building sounds really cool. I think a Superhuman for anything really needs to optimize for the end goal of that user. So thinking about it, the end goal for a spreadsheet experience could be: saving time, building error-less spreadsheets, building a spreadsheet with transfers in mind etc.

Some of the things I would love to see are:
1) An easy way for documentation, something like Roam's graph method to see the interlinking between all your spreadsheets
2) Some cmd+k type of short cuts that really ease the discovery to the different things the sheet allows and speeds up tasks
3) Superhuman snippets for spreadsheets would be cool too

I also think a nice modeling module would be super cool as well, so like really easy to use models and visualizations.

This is a really cool idea, I'd love to try it out once it's ready!

I'm going to be a contrarian and say I think Superhuman for Excel seems like an attempt to cash in on their success from a marketing standpoint but is poorly-fitted as a design mantra. Apart from my ongoing study of design, I am old enough to have seem multiple iterations of pre-GUI command-key apps and what worked and didn't. I've lived through several generations of the same idea being re-invented, not always as an improved version.

Superhuman addresses the pain point of needing to churn through email fast. They deliver a relatively small set of features through commands and save people time being being fast.

You can say you're doing a better Excel but I don't think there's an equivalent pain point of speed that can be addressed by simply providing keyboard shortcuts - Excel already does that for power users.

Mis-identifying AirTable as focus only on the storage side of things indicates you either don't understand why it's been successful or are just trying to throw out some slander to make your product look better. I suggest anyone interested in why AirTable has gone so well read https://usefyi.com/airtable-history/ and consider the many ways it provides for people to visualise information.

Seriously, dive deep into that article. Also consider that their key inspiration point of how people use Excel (lists of lists) is exactly the same one behind Trello, due to Joel Spolsky's experience on the Excel team.

BTW I'm now a massive fan of https://www.causal.app/ for modeling because it makes it trivially easy to play with ranges of input values and generate models.

Despite my negativity above, I'd encourage you to go for it but be clear about what you're doing. There should at least be a couple of good articles in discussing the pain points you uncover.

If I can see Superhuman for X as a red flag, I'm sure many a VC does the same thing!