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Comment by c4mpute | Hacker News Reader

To be somewhat constructive: What you rather should have done is not create more elaborate dashboards. What imho the world needs is an easy way to use a spreadsheet tool to generate and publish a dashboard. A "make web dashboard" button right next to the print button. With auto-updates when input data changes of course.

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Have you... used Excel? It's very simple to create any kind of "dashboard" (AKA graphs on a page) and then you just share the web link to the page.

Yes, I have. What Excel is still lacking is an easy solution for the input side. You can bind tons of data sources, but all are weird, hard-to-use, manual. There is no easy "grab this from that website, get the current data of what I just pasted there, mash it together, publish it"

Hell, it cannot even do proper CSV import. You need to reformat your CSV to match the locale Excel is running under!

Uh? Are you sure you've actually used Excel? The CSV import is highly configurable and leads you immediately into Power Query where you can massage the data any way you want.

The LibreOffice CSV import is configurable. The Excel one isn't.

You can do things in PowerQuery, but that is far from obvious and still buggy. Not to mention all the woes after import, like date/time auto-interpretation and autocorrections that cannot be switched off.

I stand by what I said. Excel imports are a huge mess.

Would you like me to send you some online tutorials on how to import CSVs into excel? Because at this point it's just crazy. Are you using excel 2009? Do you not know about the "Data" tab in the ribbon? There's a whole dialog to complete with several options when you import a CSV file.

Cut it with the attitude. This is not the place for it.

Who are you?

Powerquery oh god never again!

Are you evaluating import or open? Open does stuff to the data right away, import lets you push buttons first:

https://www.fcc.gov/general/opening-csv-file-excel

Yup. That's what I want to build. Thank you for saying that -- I feel like it really validates my feelings hah

The problem is always this project turns into “let’s build excel or tableau” and the customers that care usually already use one or the other.

That's fair, but fortunately I'm not planning on doing either. (Well, I am still implementing ~all of Excel's formulas for compatibility, but not the the UI/UX...)

People don't really consume data, they read documents. I think that's (part of) the vision these projects lack.

I'm working on an OSS BI tool focused on a document form factor. Might be of interest to you. https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

Thank you! Definitely interesting! I had actually starred that repo when I saw it being discussed on some HN thread a week or two ago

Yeah, I misread the post I replied to: I’ve been on a bunch of internal dashboard projects that were in danger of losing focus and turning into full-fledged visualization platforms.

There is Smartsheet, which mostly works well for this, but its power-user features are pretty limited compared to Excel.

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