Show HN: XLpup, usage tracking for excel workbooks

xlpup.com

2 points·vulpesx2··3 comments

Hey HN,

My name is Aadhi and I'm a long-time excel user. I started my journey with excel when I was working at a F500 running daily / weekly reports for management.

I found out pretty quickly that many of my reports weren't being read even though it took hours out of my week to make them. Hence the inspiration for XLpup (https://xlpup.com).

XLpup tracks the usage / traffic your excel workbook gets via some VBA code that pings a server whenever the workbook is opened. It currently only works for Windows machines - but I do plan on including Mac support in the near future as well.

I'm just getting started, so early users / feedback are greatly appreciated!

How does your product ensure privacy?

In other words: how does your product make sure people aren’t going to abuse it by distributing unique copies of their workbooks so they can track the exact times of individual recipients looking at them?

Yeah - great point. I'm actually working on a way to detect if a set of IDs are being used on the same workbook. This is possible technically via some environment variables inherent to the spreadsheet - but it opens up another can of worms on the privacy side of information I'd have to collect.

I think the short-term solution will be to throttle unique ID creation to 5 / email - not perfect, but I'm a one-man team so will have to bite at this problem step-wise :)

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