Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
useslate.com
useslate.com
This is definitely a feature that Excel ought to have, which is both good news and bad news for your business. The good news is that you'll probably find willing buyers. The bad news is if you find too many buyers, Microsoft will probably implement something similar in their products, which will put your business at risk.
There are a few ways to survive in these situations. One is to keep moving with more products and add-ins. That's basically what Xobni had to do, but it will be exhausting, and I think at some point you'll run out of steam. Another way is to take out patents and hope for a licensing deal or buy-out from Microsoft.
A third survival strategy is to have a better product than what Microsoft will inevitably come out with. It's become cliche at this point, but high product quality requires, above all, focus. Microsoft might have more money than you, but if you're willing to focus, you'll actually have more time to think about the product than they'll have to think about their feature.
To be honest, I were you guys, I'd pick either the Cloud version or the Excel Add-in and go all in (i.e. dump the other one). Then make that version the absolute best it can be.
If you're going to focus on one version or the other, there are a lot of factors to consider, and you guys know the market and technology better than I do. One factor in favor of the Add-in is that you'll be able to charge a single purchase price up-front, which will give you more short-term revenues that will enable you to grow your business without taking (as much) outside investment. Subscription models are great for big companies and VC-funded startups, but they're actually a raw deal for cash-starved, self-funded companies.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing. I look forward to seeing where you take Slate!
My initial impressions - in an unfiltered, stream-of-conciousness "Ignore if you like" form:
- Why would I pay a per month fee for an Excel add-in?
- The visual examples - the screen width was so wide that I had trouble grasping how I would use this to see the big picture without zooming out (as you did)
- At no point did I understand why I needed to use "the cloud" yet the pricing implies that I do
- The Prezi demo took a long time to load
- The Prezi demo showed me one thing: error handling. That's an edge case though isn't it? The question is, "Do most people who work with Excel spend most of their time trying to spot/correct errors in spreadsheets, or do they spend most of their time trying to understand the data in pristine spreadsheets?" I'd argue that it's the latter.
- I have absolutely no idea about how it works with a sample data set. This is very important to me.
That's just my random feedback. Maybe it's useful to you. it seems like a cool product.
To respond to these points: - Enterprise software seems to be moving increasingly towards a subscription pricing mode. (eg Office 365). Additionally, this is software that will be used on a regular (daily, at least weekly) basis, and when you calculate the potential time-savings, pays for itself quickly, - Thanks for the UI tip. We are working really hard on improving the UI, esp as this is one of our main selling points! - We need to be clearer on benefits of cloud vs addin. One of our big learning points recently has been that users seem to favour the addin over the cloud. - Sorry about this. - From speaking to our target users (mainly analysts in the financial industry), there are two things that repeatedly come out: error handling and understanding exactly how complex spreadsheets works. We have found interest has been about 50:50 for both - This is a fair point! We will include some sample data and show the Slate view with it.
1) Everything's really slow. Installation's very, very slow and not responsive and the add-in seems to add considerably to Excel start up time.
2) No ribbon, just three buttons on Add-Ins tab, it looks a bit unprofessional.
3) It doesn't really work - when I click on "Show sheet" it sends the browser to some local file slate.html in temp directory, which seems to have just:
Need Help?
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Double click to show full tree again.
There are no formulae on this sheet to display
Contact support@slateforexcel.com for support queries or feedback.
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Where's the stuff I saw in the video? Was that Mac-only?
4) I'd look into using Excel-DNA/NetOffice instead of VSTO, which requires a runtime. That makes it easier for business units to subscribe directly without going through the IT and the whole procurement process, etc.
At the moment, we are using the browser to render Slate view so that we could use available web technologies to draw the tree.
Good point about Excel-DNA: we will take a look at this.
We have had some compatibility issues with Excel 2007. Perhaps we could take this to email? I am fraser@useslate.com
Trying to visualize an entire sheet is fairly silly as a paradigm, because the only sheets that are easy to visualize this way are too simple for this to be useful. And Excel is a heavily visual environment already, where the visualization is controlled by the user. Context-sensitive visualization that fits within the workflow would seem to be much better. As it stands, this is optimized for technical people who don't really use Excel enough to be good at it, yet have to debug simple workbooks authored by others. I don't think that's a big enough market.
It's my impression that the kind of people that need to resort to using spreadsheets as a highly abstracted programming language are (mostly) mutually exclusive with the kinds of people that would want/need this deep grain analysis. But I'm just some dude. The more I think about it, I could imagine some non-quant in the financial services industry may be interested in something like this.
A-ha. Here's the hidden assumption. You're looking at sheets that have a handful of parameters/assumptions and span out their consequences. (You want to stake out the market of people selling Monte Carlo add-ins.)
Many people use spreadsheets as ad hoc accretion calculators/graphers/explorers. This very week -- I estimated about a hundred separate generalized-extreme-value models in Mathematica (working basically by hand to import data from Excel; but this because there was a lot of careful culling), then exported a number of statistics from the distributions. Then I spent a couple of hours a day later looking at scatterplots in Excel -- trying transformations, whatever worked -- that helped me show how those models isolated a particular global feature across the hundred-or-so distributions.
I was looking at your demo and shaking my head -- "is this for cash flow models? But it doesn't even have features for stochastic parameters..." But I guess I see it.
It looks awesome. Actuaries will love you guys.
The add-in should work back to Excel 2007.