I've been a fan of SlickGrid for a while, it handles huge data sets relatively well. If you want excel-style functionality it'll still take a little work.
https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
In A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library usedmleibman
SlickGrid
JavaScript2010–2015
mleibman / SlickGrid
SlickGrid
A lightning fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet
15Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.9KGitHub stars
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What it is
A lightning fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet
GitHub
Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-12-16 20:00:59 UTC to 2015-08-21 11:33:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Welcome to SlickGrid
Find documentation and examples in the wiki.
UPDATE: March 5th, 2014 - I have too many things going on in my life right now to really give SlickGrid support and development the time and attention it deserves. I am not stopping it, but I will most likely be unresponsive for some time. Sorry.
UPDATE: This repo hasn't been updated in a while. https://github.com/6pac/SlickGrid/wiki seems to be the most active fork at the moment.
SlickGrid is an advanced JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component
Some highlights:
Adaptive virtual scrolling (handle hundreds of thousands of rows with extreme responsiveness)
Extremely fast rendering speed
Supports jQuery UI Themes
Background post-rendering for richer cells
Configurable & customizable
Full keyboard navigation
Column resize/reorder/show/hide
Column autosizing & force-fit
Pluggable cell formatters & editors
Support for editing and creating new rows.
Grouping, filtering, custom aggregators, and more!
Advanced detached & multi-field editors with undo/redo support.
“GlobalEditorLock” to manage concurrent edits in cases where multiple Views on a page can edit the same data.
Support for millions of rows
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
3 sourcesI'm not the parent, but we switched from Datatables to SlickGrid: https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
Much nicer API and it's fast for large amounts of data. Unfortunately like many things it's lacking a lot of docs so you have to dig through the source of the examples.
In DataTables – Table plug-in for jQueryI'm using SlickGrid[1] in an internal tool. It uses divs and spans to display data, so there are certainly nice examples that do so.
1. https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
In Blink tag removed from Firefox