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Comment by crrashby | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on this myself and would really love to get some feedback. Would this be useful for the problems you have with Excel?

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How do you plan to support links between documents. The place I work at now has a very complex budgeting process where each department sends my office their budget spreadsheets and we link them all into an overview that also does things like calculating benefits payments and taxes. There's a lot that can go wrong in that process, and every time I go back and look at a submitted version I find some mistake someone missed.

Slate will show the cells that are in another document but referenced by the current sheet. However, it would not show any further levels of referenced cells.

So say I reference the value "Total Sales" which is in another sheet. That would show in the the tree but the individual sales that contribute to the total would not be shown.

We wanted people to know where the numbers are coming from but at the same time keep the trees for different sheets and files separate to prevent them becoming too unwieldy and hard to understand.

Our product is a reverse auction procurement tool used by large business customers. As you can imagine, we work with a lot of spreadsheets. We have knowledge workers who receive (sometimes complex) Excel documents from customers. A not insignificant amount of time is spent interpreting these sheets so we can understand how a customer evaluates pricing data. This evaluation leads to a bid model, which we use to collect pricing on line items that roll up in to a total-value number.

Really looking forward to trying it out.

it's a great idea - much better than the old built-in formula dependency tracker. definitely loving your idea! I've been in the Excel business myself for years (having worked in finance) and always love when someone comes up with a fresh tool for the mighty Excel (yeah, I know most developer's views on Excel...). I've recently started www.spreadgit.com which is a GitHub-like service for spreadsheets. looking forward to playing around with your service!

It looks really cool, I think the two tools kind of go hand in hand. Sharing sheets and understanding them.

yup. feel free to drop me an email if you want to touch base (i've just done the sign-up)

Cool. I'm chris@slateforexcel.com btw

It certainly is a good idea.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I've been toying with the idea of having users use a data flow diagram to structure complex spreadsheets. Still have a pre-prototype stage and I'ld love to get your expert feedback on that idea. If interested please drop me a note.

Great idea! Do you have to upload the spreadsheet? If yes then a big downer. Better if you could release and sell as Excel Plugin

hmm, what's wrong with uploading it? I would actually prefer the no-Addin solution: the Excel Addin 'deployment' is a bit messy (with references stuck in the Addin-manager) + no Addins in the Mac world (though I guess that >95% of Excel users are on windows)

We were definitely pursuing the add-on route. Although add-ons can be clunky we felt people would want to switch between the two views quickly and often. For example, if you make a change in the spreadsheet view you might want to see what effect that had on the tree. What do you think?

hmm, guess I got a bit ahead of myself - you are right, you wouldn't want to switch views/apps as you would indeed expect people to use it in quite a dynamic way. really looking forward to it!

Dual-view, in two windows.

Also, uploading would make it an instant non-starter for me, due to data sensitivity issues.

Proprietary information

Would you expect a financially sensitive information of a company to be uploaded on a third party site?

Would you expect a financially sensitive document of a company to be uploaded on a third party site?

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