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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

I've heard one of the best ways is to work at a company for awhile and identifying what they have problems with.

Another neat approach is to use Google auto complete to help. If you are a Excel wizard, type "I wish Excel could..." and let Google complete the rest. You might find some interesting use cases that people are searching for.

I tried letting Google complete that for me and it didn't offer a single completion. Go figure. A great general approach, though.

After sorting through a bunch of junk about making an Excel wish list, here are some pages about suggested Excel improvements:

https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/blog/excel-weaknesses-a-w...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/excel...

You don't even have to be an Excel wizard. Just a competent Excel user.

A previous company I worked at made YouTube videos for content marketing purposes. For some reason that no one could explain by the time I started there, the first couple videos in the account were random, basic Excel tutorials. Nothing fancy. Just things like using the Cell Formatting dropdown or doing a VLOOKUP.

Those videos were 5+ years old by the time I left. And in their worst week, a single one of those Excel videos got more views than the entire view count of every non-Excel video combined. It was crazy.

Another similar approach is to see what crazy process they're trying to jam into Excel or Google Sheets, and then you can build a more tailored app for that process, ideally if other businesses could benefit from it.

Edit: I should've read giarc's comment below! We're essentially saying the same thing.

If you roll around in enough problems you'll eventually find one that's not solved properly and yet is fairly prevalent.

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