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Comment by octo6 | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions.

Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots.

[1] https://www.excelchat.co

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Word of advice - slow down your sliders. I read at an absurdly fast pace and I barely finish the "Our Experts" excerpts before it scrolls. I know, from testing, that I can mouse over them to pause them but that isn't intuitive to people who don't build these sorts of things as their day job.

That being said - bookmarked. I've needed this in the past and while I may not need it right now I probably will in the future.

Pretty good advice - the sliders are incredibly fast. (I'm not a fast reader though).

This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too fast, and some always think they are too slow.

They should be able to be paused, controlled for prev/next movement, last a minimum of 3 seconds (and longer for large pieces of text). If it is too slow the user can click "next" without it being an annoying experience. If it is too fast - even with the ability to go back - it is an annoying experience without the ability to pause it. But it is always better to be too slow than to be too fast.

My honest advice would be [1] and it should be designed in such a way that all reviews are visible, perhaps in 3 columns, instead of a stupid carousel slider. But slowing down the slider would be more trivial - as I expect very few people are actually able to read all of the text of any of the excerpts before it changes on them.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause...

[1] http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

thanks for the pointers.. passing them on to our UI designer.

Oh my god what an idea.

Ill take a serious look. Theoretically, this could be a huge boon for all the small businesses I work with.

I spreadsheet on my own for fun to solve physics problems and do video games calculations. I will take my free trial for sure.

cool, glad you like the idea. lmk how your session goes!

Nice idea, and the monetization pricing seems on point without being excessive. How do you vet the 'experts' for your service? How do I know using your service, that expert will be 'better than me' ?

so all experts are tested on insanely tough excel tests before being allowed to join the platform. And their explanations are audited on ongoing basis. So.. we think it nails it!

Is it english only?

yes, currently all English. But the expert opens a shared sheet that you work together in, so you can collaborate in Google sheet or Excel. Hope that makes up for English only

Ok, very interesting, will pass it up to some friends, thanks!

Cool - bookmarked!

awesome!!!!! Can't wait to use this.

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