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Comment by planet-and-halo | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basic set of functions relevant to genomics, + a "we won't fuck up your data" feature.

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Hi - I'm building a networked spreadsheet product and had heard of this auto-correct problem in genomics research through word of mouth a couple of times, so have asked this question myself. (I was astonished to learn just how much of genomics work involves sending Excel files back and forth!) Here's the conclusion that I have come to:

- It's definitely possible to build a custom spreadsheet product with a small team, even one targeted at such a "niche" user group. So it's an idea worth testing.

- Product can be "backwards compatible" - you can export to xlxs and import from xlxs - so you don't have to change behaviour of the entire industry on day one to get this to work, only a single genomics researcher or lab.

- Pricing, unit economics, etc are unknown to me (I have no background in genomics or scientific research). But presumably you could leverage standard SaaS models and build a viable model up from there using a few case studies. There's definitely schleppy behaviour going on here that can be solved.

- Even a "lifestyle business" has significant upside beyond the financial: improving genomics research improves genomic research!

- The product advantage over time presumably involve building more custom tooling into the genomics / data ecosystem. "Not creating typos" is just the beachhead.

I've never actually interviewed genomics people about their need here, but if anyone knows people with this problem I would love to talk to them: @mceoin on twitter. (DMs open)

That’s an expensive workaround to just formatting your cells as text before entering the values

You'd be surprised how much effort can be saved by not relying on human interaction to be reliable.

Though convincing people to switch to a new app for that reason, even if it were free and Free, would still be an uphill struggle.

> just formatting your cells as text before entering the values

It is a little more than that. I work with finance people, and there a lot of data is manipulated in Excel but passed around as CSV files for compatibility elsewhere. This causes no end of problems because fixes by setting cell properties are obviously lost in transcription, and date errors creep in as things are moved back & forth between people in the US and those in locales that do dates properly.

Probably not: people use excel because it's available, it's what they know, and it's what their peers use.

It's been going for more than half a decade now, and genomicists apparently would rather rename genes than stop using excel...

The easier solution is coming up with a 1:1 human-readable-hashing scheme so that MARCH4 translates to "funny-blue-smell-tuesday". Then you keep the safe key in a column next to the unsafe key.

>a "we won't fuck up your data" feature

That's a hard to implement feature. Hand waving and buzzword lingo will not be enough for people to believe it.

> That's a hard to implement feature.

It really isn't: just remove the data autodetection anything and you're done.

I think the size and scope of Excel is hard to replicate, however it sounds like it would make a great plugin.

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