Performance

As this application is still an early release, the Objectsheet's performance is limited. Drawing and calculating very large tables can be slow. Here are some suggestions for optimizing Objectsheet performance for large tables.

Performance guideline: The Objectsheet goes through two stages of processing: 1) calculation of formulas and 2) placing the calculated results in actual table cells. Objectsheet performance is limited more by the second stage, cell display. On a reasonably modern PC, a single Objectsheet table may calculate 9000 cells/second, but only display 600 cells/second.

What to do	Applicable...	What it helps with	How to do it
Mark table offline	For data that is not expected to change	Prevents section from being calculated and its display refreshed automatically (section can still be calculated manually)	In the Sections menu (at top of Objectsheet application), find the applicable section and check the "OffLine" checkbox
Hide entire section	For data that changes, but that doesn't need to be displayed.	Prevents section from display being refreshed (section is still calculated each time)	In the Sections menu (at top of Objectsheet application), find the applicable section and uncheck the "visible" checkbox. Alternatively, you can window-shade a section by clicking on the  ‾  box at upper left corner of section.
Hide table instance area	When you want to be able to edit formulas, but don't need the actual data to be displayed.	Displays Templates, but prevents instance section from being displayed.	Set filter formula to "0" (show Section template by clicking the "S" button, then type a zero as the filter expression)
Use bare() cell display	For read only text (does not need to be edited)	bare() display formula renders about 30% faster than the standard editable text cell.	Set display formula for a particular column (using the Property template) or for all columns (using the Section template) to bare().
Filter instance area	When you can get by with summarizing (for instance, see only every nth row)	Rows that do not pass the filter criteria are calculated, but are not displayed.	In the Section template, set the filter formula to row%n==0 to show every nth row (e.g., row%10==0). You can also set the filter formula to display rows that meet a criteria you set.
Use separate "filter" table	When you want to pick out data and examine it in another table.	"Filter" table selects and shows only those rows from table with data.	Hide table with data (either entire table or instance area only-- see above). In "filter" table, enter the following misc template formula: selectRows(table1, "index%10==0"). The first parameter is the table with the data, the second parameter is the expression that selects rows (in this case, every 10th row is shown)
Load large tables safely	When loading a large table may take a long time.	Automatically hides instance area (see "Hide Table instance area" above) of large tables when loaded from the File menu.	In the File menu, change the number in the "Hide Table >        Cells" menu item.