Show HN: Slate – Spreadsheet Visualisation Beta Launch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Slate – Spreadsheet Visualisation Beta Launch

useslate.com

27 pointscrrashby5 comments

I love it - I do this by hand so often.

Quality control: Tools and experience get you a long way with quality, although two calculations are key to understanding how to control quality. 1) Percentage of defects remaining. 2) Defect removal rate of a quality control process. - When you understand these, you will see it is the manual process that has 80% of the impact and tools 20%. Your tool looks like it will speed up the manual process no end.

Maybe use "Making Spreadsheet Formulas Understandable." Or something that makes it clear the focus is on formulas and not say graphs. "Spreadsheet Formula Visualisation"?

Good luck - I am working on improving spreadsheets - www.cellmaster.com.au - drop me a line and I will add you to linkedin - or something.

I watched the video, because I thought it could be useful for our monthly discussion of metrics (revenue, etc.).

My Feedback

Presentation: I disliked the music; it created a leisurly feel and reminded me of soft drink commercials.

Tool: In general I like the idea of "zooming" into the numbers and the presentation format of a tree. However I think there was too much horizontal scrolling involved. I think that by this you lose the all-important overview. Maybe something like prezie could work better here...

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the feedback and sorry you dislike the music! We thought that the voiceover needed something extra so added it. As we move out of beta, we will definitely be looking at ways of improving the UI - ease of navigation is super important

I know some people who create videos/short movies. They said, people will forgive bad quality images, but not bad quality sound. They said getting the sound right matters more than the visuals.

Slate is hammering on such a huge problem in organisations. Spreadsheets are still the programming tool of the masses and there really aren't good debugging tools for them.

I'm really interested to see where this goes. Nice work guys.

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