The world needs a better spreadsheet
blog.voyager.vc
blog.voyager.vc
I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user.
Almost every customer was so receptive and excited, it was a fun and job and easy sell.
But later, we learnt that those customers were in fact the early adopters, and Lotus never did manage to cross the chasm with that product. Later Microsoft produced Excel and..well the rest is history.
My conclusion: the world doesn't need a better spreadsheet. Existing spreadsheet technologies are good enough for the hokey, half-baked things that people like to build with them.
It's from another digital software age and from experience, hard not to think of the applications created with it as archaic monstrosities, yet there was something there.
In many ways it was what the OP is talking about: a networked formbuilder that allowed for people with technical skills roughly equivalent to that of an Excel superstar to build actual line of business apps.
For those same reasons, it had lots of issues. Often a spreadsheet is the right choice, maybe not when it gets to be 200MB and corrupts itself because multiple people are accessing the same file across the network.
Notes apps worked until they didn't, but are still kind of fascinating in their awfulness.
The presence of zombie Notes apps that spew out of control is more a statement about IT than the platform. My mom, not a power user, was a public health nurse. She put together with a sophomore intern what grew into a good sized disease outbreak tracker after IT failed to deliver. All in Notes.
The IT idiots discovered it and got all puffy. They siphoned off funding and stuck its "enterprise" replacement into some portfolio process. 5 years later and $5-6M spent they launched a replacement that didn't quite do what it needed to do. She retired almost 10 years ago, and that little app still lives for a few use cases.
Those apps were simultaneously powerful and broken. The sheer number of apps the company had was staggering. "There's an (notes) app for that", only 20 years prior.
Of course, some people just used the @ formulas.
Anyway, I haven't come across anything that so naturally expressed document workflow with forms and email integration. People complain about Notes email, but it was nice to have it so tightly integrated with the Notes capabilities.
123 put extreme power in the hands of skilled users. If you mastered print code strings it provided for many promotions and tech opportunities. Even today the spreadsheet is the Letherman or slide rule of old time geeks.
I still have a 123 startup disk for my compaq ( no hard disk. 2 floppy version. )
123 changed many people's lives. Truly.
Excel is relict of old ages: slow, bug ridden, impractical. In my job whenever I need to work with excel I feel pure hate. I send hundreds of this shit to people that are non technical and they... they... send it back.
People build the most insane, unmaintainable, insecure messes using spreadsheets - because they can.
The same can be said for any programming language/tool. Reminds me of this quote attributed to Doug Gwyn:
"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."
I'm joking... mostly. That said, I really have used elisp functions on an org-tbl in anger before.
As I recall, Lotus made some purchases to try to follow the same strategy but it was too late by then.
There were also the attempts at fully integrated products like Symphony and Framework (Ashton Tate) but the loose coupling really won the mass market.
Around 1991 they had an all-new cross-platform super-product under development, but it crashed and burned and they had to plough on with 123.
I did a lot of the low-level GUI coding for the Open Look and Motif versions of 123. Fun times.
I believe Improv was written in Objective-C while the one I mean was in C++.
Improv is way above the pack... so much it's not a good thing.
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? -- SICP
I think the real uncanny valley here lies in maintaining software, not designing it. Business needs change over time and software must adapt.
I think the best option is to build your own software. Understand it top to bottom and make it do exactly what you need to do. Sadly this is not possible for most people.
The next best option, however, is not to spend $3,000 on something written over a weekend that won't be supported down the road. The best option is to go with the Salesforce solution.
My first programming gig (in high school) was automating a process that involved manipulating index cards and doing some basic math. I also trained them on how to operate, maintain and extend the system. The end result worked fine for a few years, until it was eventually replaced with some elaborate proprietary system that cost about as much every 3 months as the whole system I delivered. But that system came with ongoing support that obviated the need for any in-house expertise. So they felt the additional expense was worthwhile. And I was happy not to have to take the support calls.
Edit: And ultimately both systems were more accurate and saved time over the manual process.
I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests.
I get a ton of requests related to lists of collections within the app, which could be maintained by the users themselves.
Yes, and it's called Salesforce (or Dynamics if you like more pain than Salesforce already causes).
I have better things to do than write a full front-to-back webapp to organize garbage scattered around in spreadsheets, so it's been a lifesaver since I can create a new object or field in a couple clicks (and if I need to write some custom UI or backend code I still have the option to do so).
That was written what, 40 years ago? Fast forward today now computer hardware is meant to be discarded! protocols change, batteries and disks are sealed inside cases, driver software is abandoned to cloud-disabled... a piece of hardware 3 years old is ancient, unsupported, trash.
The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company.
It's not even good marketing.
Re spreadsheets, I am one of those dreaded 'advanced Excel' people and some of the comments i hear about spreadsheet limitations are a bit like saying 'this chisel is a rubbish hammer'. Our main use is to take small amounts of data from our ERP and browse/sum/subtotal it in some way for adhoc analysis or sharing, or keep the record of some minor detail over time. I have seen thousands of lower skilled users use spreadsheets in this way and there is no better tool. Indeed accountants often run much more complex stuff, but tend to be very dilligent with their inputs and versioning and have little trouble. As soon as you have concurrent users a spreadsheet becomes a bad database substitute.
The first line says it is a transcript from a talk, so you shouldn't expect literature.
Nice work getting 3k for that kind of project, you're a better business man than me. If someone like that came my way I would direct them to Google forms or spreadsheet for free.
First, to state the obvious: in the time your least-favourite Excel sheet took to grow from simple time-saver to sprawling Cthuloid monster, it has probably saved multiple person-years of effort. You could spend the next six months rebuilding it all "properly", and it's still comically positive ROI.
Spreadsheets are also a unique, top-level category in computing as a whole. By my count, there have only ever been three schemes of interaction with computers (with any significant adoption):
1. Shrink-wrap. Use the software you've been given. Read the manual; that's what it does, no more.
2. Programming language. It's text, it's got syntax, it's got the same basic constructs as any other programming language. You know they're all the same, because once you know a few languages, you can start using a new one in an hour or two.
3. Spreadsheets. Visual interaction, scaling smoothly from "simple calculator" to "this is the backbone of our whole business".
Spreadsheets really are that fundamental a discovery in the field of computing. Give them some love.
I don't have an answer for this. For https://anvil.works we deliberately avoided this pitfall by never pretending to be a spreadsheet (or, for that matter, shrinkwrap, like Salesforce does). We make you write code from step 1, and get comfy with it, because if you started in any other paradigm it would be too hard to switch. And if you don't write code, you'll never get much advantage over just using Access.
Edit: oh, you're not computing something so much as you're using shrink wrapped software to build documents, presentations, or manipulate images. So, not quite the same.
As for programming languages, I disagree. You don't go from only knowing say Python, PHP and Java to being able to use Haskell in a few hours. There's a substantial learning curve in being able to use a sufficiently different programming language. And no, "Hello, World" or typing in a few simple commands from a tutorial don't count.
Do you suppose the a C programmer is just going to be building a meaningful Smalltalk or Lisp program after a couple of hours? Or that a Javascript programmer is going to be whipping up C++ applications in that amount of time?
Spreadsheets don't succeed outside of pure numerical calculations because they're that good, they succeed because they're versatile and ubiquitous, and everyone already has Excel or Google Sheets. If everyone already had, say, Sharepoint, or even some drag-and-drop no-cost rapid application generator that requires zero sysadmin skills to run, that would be the new baseline.
The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce.
That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.
I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc.
What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility.
However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API.
I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.
That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :)
Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks.
I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.
And if your users don't need to access a lot of different "types" of data (objects) the $25/mo "App Cloud" license is a cheap way to get going.
We see a huge peak with agencies and freelancers using our service, just to avoid building admin panels for a client. Easy, clean & simple.
We're aiming squarely at your use case: more than just a form builder; less fuss than fighting Heroku for four hours.
Our big point with Anvil (https://anvil.works) is something already noted here: The key is being able to write real code.
Pure Crud - anything sufficiently simple to do with a spreadsheet - is going to be done by a slick single-purpose startup. But anything that requires custom logic, you won't get quite what you want and you'll be stuck in spreadsheet-land or spending thousands on a contractor. Offering people a choice between those extremes can relieve a lot of pain.
Interesting. I'm working on a product based on a similar premise, for end-users, but focused on financial services.
I'm curious, did you try pitching to customers, or just investors?
I think narrowing down to a specific industry like you're doing helps the problem immensely. A true schema builder is a hard sell to both non-technical users (when point solutions offer more with WAY less setup) and technical users (see how tech people view Salesforce, for example). However, Quickbase and Airtable are doing it currently. Very interested to see how Airtable matures.
I read this when I was a teen (as that's long ago). It was at a time Lotus was going to launch Improv in 1993! Improv was the attempt made by a very smart team at Lotus to reconquer the crowd that went to Excel.
But as you can guess, the great product never found its market (or never grew beyond a niche) and was killed a few years later.
[1] https://www.quantrix.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software
I happen to think "paying for good tools" is a good thing but as a student/stockboy: A thousand dollars is a fucking lot of dollars, especially if your business is still running on debt.
"Sorry, Your Spreadsheet Has Errors (Almost 90% Do)"
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/09/how-to-reduce-spread...
The 2008 source article is
"What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors"
And the point is not to completely dismiss the idea with a glib soundbite like that, but to actually take seriously building tools like spreadsheets that allow non-technical users to build data-driven systems.
Access is good to prototype a database and use GUI/UX controls to make forms and other stuff. It is good for small projects, but once you need to upscale you need to go to SQL Server. I did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s migrated databases from Excel and Access to SQL Server.
On Linux, people use MySQL or PostgreSQL for the same reason and upgrade from SQLlite3 etc.
I wrote Access apps in college for cash to doctors and small business and I still have no love for the tool.
I would like to see more scripting/automation features on email.
Instead, I read this comment as meaning a few different things:
1. It is difficult to get users to try something different.
2. Most users don't comprehend the limitations of the software with which they are already familiar.
mmm. which features do you want?
and you over there, which features to do you want.
and you, in the corner?
It adds up, doesn't it!
It still seems like something like this is in the realm of possible. Salesforce mostly does this, but its UI is garbage and most people end up hiring implementors for it.
The trouble is the pricing model. $25/user per month for the edition that's not hobbled. For some use cases, that makes sense. For others, it's just way too high.
For a close friend?
My sites were all personal projects, so the traffic was low enough that I could notice an uptick in traffic visually.
Also things like google analytics etc.
Hey { referer }, ...
A fucking chatbox? I already hate your company.
A fucking chatbox from the author of a blog? I hate you and everything you stand for. You are what's wrong with the internet. You should know better, and you do. But you do this anyway. Just stop.