Show HN: Version Control for Excel

Co-founder here. We're data versioning people AND people that love Excel. We constantly lamented the fact that there is no proper revision control for Excel and eventually decided to do something about it!

Excel is one of the most widely used software products in the world. Word Processors probably have more users, but Excel is no word processor. It is - we think - a programming language and database combined.

There are somewhere between 500m and 1 billion Excel users on the planet. Way more than the 30 million 'programmers'. It is the most used programming language on the planet [1].

Excel runs a huge number of business functions from budgeting, product management, customer accounts, to many other things. The value of Excel is presenting the data, with a set of formulae that let you keep derived data up-to-date. This inferred data provides sums and computations, sometimes simple, but sometimes exquisitely complex. And through this whole range of complexity, with half a billion users, virtually nobody treats Excel seriously. But why?

We have a programming language which is essentially acting as a declarative database, and we don't do unit tests, we don't keep track of changes, we collaborate by sending by mail or sticking in SharePoint, and God-forbid we should do any serious linting. Programmers and DBAs will look at Excel in terror and say 'get off ASAP'. But anyone who has used Excel in anger knows why it is so brilliant. Show me another declarative constraint based, data driven inference language that I can teach to my grandmother and I'll eat my hat!

The problem isn't Excel. The problem is that we are treating Excel like it's a word processor, and not what it is: a programming language. Source control has driven a revolution in the way programmers do their work. Git is ubiquitous at this stage. Excel is not a source file. It is a database coupled with code. Git was not built for this - good luck trying to use Git to resolve merge conflicts in Excel - it will butcher your file.

That is why we built VersionXL, a more sophisticated revision control system, one that can understand Excel. Your users can in Excel and get the benefits of source control.

Collaboration, two or more versions of the same workbook at the same time with the ability to merge the correct changes. Any mistake you just roll back. Lots of SaaS services, like Google sheets, go the quick and dirty route: one central database and the UI displays a view which you all work on together. That's not collaboration - and no developer would accept that as a reasonable way to work. Take a copy of the Excel, work on it on your own machine, then merge it after a colleague has had a chance to review.

Safety and fearless experimentation, save the state of your work at any moment. That means you can feel free to experiment as you develop; if something doesn’t work out, you can always return to an earlier saved state where things were okay.

Branching, creating a “branch” keeps multiple streams of work independent from each other while also providing the facility to merge that work back together. You can model out a variety of scenarios on different branches of the same workbook using the same core information.

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...