Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

brain

On it, Sam.

I'm not familiar with SlideShare, but from Wikipedia that seems to focus on sharing presentations rather than building them.

Here's what I mean, specifically: advisory work done by the big consulting companies and Wall Street M&A shops usually consists of lots and lots of Excel files being carefully massaged to create certain outputs that are then dropped in as images into PowerPoint with some text around them, mostly following the exact same formatting guidelines, which are then printed, bound and shown to clients.

Currently, you have to train people to not only know how to come up with the data (i.e. corporate finance, accounting, management consulting) but also teach them how to use powerpoint, think about formatting, make sure they memorize the right color palette, etc. Sometimes formatting alone is 50% of the work – your boss will always tell "you used the wrong shade of blue"...

A lot of these pages are the exact same across assignments. One example is a standard page with valuation multiples over time, comparing client company against a set of peers and/or the S&P500. Or a stock price performance chart.

Annoyingly, you have to set up pages manually virtually every time, and there's no separation between presentation and content.

With RMarkdown + RStudio, you can write Markdown code and embed images into your resulting PDF. Banking / Consulting is doing the same thing, except using PowerPoint. But PowerPoint is a slideshow app, not a PDF authoring tool.

My hypothesis: creating a PDF authoring tool that embeds data from Excel / other sources with formatting kept separate (think a separate CSS file) would be a game changer and revolutionize the industry (though admittedly Wall Street hates changes and convincing people to use this would be an uphill battle)

That's true, though the things in the demos directory would simplify that.

I'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done.

Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly.

In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!

You are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.

I'm a dev and I have Office installed. You have a lot of assumptions going on, apparently.

Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does.

Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability.

Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel.

The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?

Nobody, because it doesn't support JSON. I think you've misread the comment you're replying to.

You don't know people in finance who use JSON? Have you heard of R, SciPy or NumPy?

Additionally data science / stats folk use JSON and Excel too.

Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad.

When you format the number format of the axis of a chart, you now need two steps, adding the new numberformat to a list instead of applying it directly, it serves no purpose.

When you open a spreadsheet programatically it now opens in the background of the current sheet so you have to manually look up for it instead of opening at the front as before.

When you want to save to file it is now a two steps process, where you have to select filesystem as opposed to cloud stuff then you can save. I don't use MSFT's cloud services, this is a regression to me.

When I open a spreadsheet from an email, I now have to click the edit mode at the top to be able to do anything with it.

Microsoft making it increasingly difficult to for someone to install addin or execute macros, you now have to disable many security settings. More pain for my ass, particularly if I need to do this with my colleagues computers.

Lots of small things like that, that balance the many nano-improvements that appeared over 20 years.

Hrm thanks for the feedback (and sorry for being snappy). I had a play and it looks like some things work and others don't:

- Copying and pasting from a vector app into Powerpoint makes a bitmap import

- Dragging an SVG file from Explorer into Powerpoint works properly

Not saying everyone does it, but wanting to show your chart in a web page isn't particularly unusual.