Show HN: Turn Excel spreadsheets into APIs

calcfusion.com

23 points·julienmarie··7 comments

Please remember that if you're going to have a video on your website to explain _what_ your site does -- use subtitles/captions!

You'll reach a whole lot more people by doing that. You can even translate the subtitles. They're also a good way of making a video into meta-data.

Use the Amara project. It's as easy as linking your video, writing a line or three, and then passing it around until it's done. Then someone else could come and translate it. Video i18n!

Example using Amara wrapper http://pleasecaption.me/example/my_face_is_burning.html

Then an example using video.js with link to a srt file: http://pleasecaption.me/example/

(Amara, http://www.amara.org)

How does this compare to http://appsheet.com/ ?

Hi. Instead of focusing on trying to make Excel a DB, we focus on the strength of Excel which is computations and business rules. That's the main difference :)

Hi. And how does it compare with http://sheetsu.com ?

Sheetsu is for Google Spreadsheet first, and is data oriented. We are rules and computation oriented. We do not just read the sheets, we execute them.

Are you parsing xlsx and converting it to your format and data model? Or are you running excel instances under the hood? What will happen if there's an odbc connection inside xlsx? Will it be properly executed?

We run the Excel spreadsheets on our engine. For security purposes, some Excel features are for the moment disabled ( macros, xll, odbc ). Our take is these features are to be handled by your code, that send data to the spreadsheets. The sheet will handle the logic ( business rules, computations ) and send back the result to your app.

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