anakic

Never heard of them. I'll check 'em out, thanks!:)

Thanks! I touch on the project a little, but the point was to stick to the story and make it enjoyable to read. I'm glad it worked:)

Saving up for a turquoise one:) Thanks!

Love it, haha <3

I felt like I should keep it about the story, but yeah, maybe a picture or two would be nice. I'll see about including a gif at the beginning.

Oh, also it's freemium. Most of the functionality is free, you just have a label saying it's "free for non-commercial use"

Sure. With Access you'd have to first get the data into it, process it there and get it back. With QueryStorm, you just click "connect" and you get a nice SQL editor, code completion and all. Anything that's marked as a table will show up as a database table. If you wanna connect to access or some other type of database you can do that as well, and the Excel tables will be visible to the database as temp tables.

As for PowerQuery, it's designed as an ETL tool to get data into the tabular model and process it, but isn't as expressive or as well known as SQL. It's a bit less technical, I guess. It's useful, but if you know both SQL and PowerQuery you can probably do much more with SQL.

Yeah, I do get that comment every now and then. It was originally called ThingieQuery, but then I got people saying that they liked it but couldn't ask a manager to buy something called ThingieQuery. I didn't consciously steal the JetBrains naming, but the first time someone pointed it out my reaction was d'oh...

I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may.

I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation.

The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are:

- process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq

- move data between Excel and databases

- fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code)

- replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation

It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage.

It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com.

I posted about it a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488

Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594

Cheers! Yep, most people can't be bothered to make their own lives easier. The algorithm is: if it involves anything unknown - bail.

It's entirely possible. I'll have to see what kind of support Roslyn has for F#. If the support is there, it would be extremely easy to support F#. I'll look into this, thanks for the tip!

Thanks, I really appreciate that! Glad the hours I spent preparing the videos and docs didn't go to waste:)

Well thanks a lot:) I'd love to support Python, but for now there's not enough manpower to go into it. Glad you like the docs and videos!

QueryStorm: optimizing the way we abuse Excel!:) Well, jokes aside, C# and .NET are a better tool, so at least its easier to make a good solution in Excel. I think Excel is an excellent platform for developer tools. E.g. if you're making a small application or a prototype, you just write code in C# and you have Excel to take care of data storage, data visualization and user input. With formulas and graphs you also get data-binding for free from Excel. Spend 1% of the time for 30% of the functionality you'd need from a proper app.

Yea, you could do it. In the simplest case, you could build a login form (e.g. winforms) in code in your script and use it to get the username and password from the user.

In a more serious use case, you could build your login form and all the login logic in a separate dll, and just call that dll from your scripts.

If you'd like to try this, let me know via email (antonio at querystorm.com), I can help or at least point you in the right direction.

Yeah, Excel is crazy flexible so it's no wonder that where ever there isn't a designated application for something, people fall back to Excel. I think it's a good platform to introduce dev tools in, all those small ad-hoc use cases can be served much better with some serious dev tools at hand.

Whoops... Well, at least it's also going to make creating maintainable mission critical Excel based monstrosities easier:)

Thanks for the comment! Yeah, VBA in Excel is pretty outdated in many ways, and Excel isn't going anywhere any time soon. I missed having SQL in Excel originally so that's why I started the plugin. I added C# just now, but I really like how C# and Linq fit into Excel, I just love playing around with it.

About licensing: you can get a free trial license by clicking "Try Querystorm" on the QueryStorm website. The trial lasts 14 days, but if you need a longer trial just send me an email (antonio at querystorm.com) and I'll send you an extended trial license.

If you have any suggestions or questions while you're checking it out, let me know.

Yeah, VSTO is a tricky animal. I've had quite a few mysterious issues over the last few years while building this plugin. In my case though, since I'm hosting a WPF user interface in a COM application in a WinForms host, talking to native libraries it wasn't entirely unexpected:)

A while ago, as a hobby and later a business, I made an Excel plugin for using SQL in Excel: https://www.querystorm.com

I've now added the capability to use C# in Excel, using Roslyn. Sort of like Linqpad in Excel. This lets it work with Excel tables, fiddle with formatting, and automate stuff.

Some of the practical applications:

   - processing data in Excel (LINQ)

   - getting data from various sources into Excel (REST, databases, files, active directory, whatever)

   - building interactive dashboards

   - building prototypes applications (you write logic in C# and use Excel as the UI and data storage)

Here's the introduction: https://querystorm.com/documentation.html

There's also a short video: https://vimeo.com/242216594 for a brief intro.

I charge for the plugin but it's freemium. If you don't want intellisense, error squigglies and so on, you don't need a license.

So... what do you think?

Honestly I haven't tried Office Apps, it just seemd like it would be tricky and I didn't have time to investigate. I can see how the local web server hack might work, though. Would it work in the browser and on the Mac?

Hey, I remember your username from back then, thanks for the support!! Yeah, that was the first HN post I did.

About use-cases: techy people use if for hacking away at data in Excel and import/export. Enterprises also seem to want the automation part. The main scenario there is to have IT folks prepare queries, embed them into the workbook and set up triggers. Business users or clients then just interact with the workbook, without caring about the SQL queries that are running in the background populating data. Nice for interactive reports, much faster than building web applications for the purpose. That said, I do need to start doing surveys as this are just my conclusions based on email exchanges with users.

Yeah, if you can understand vlookup, you can certainly pick up sql joins fairly easily. You can do quite a lot even with basic SQL skills.

Reaching business people from a marketing perspective and talking to them about SQL is a whole different thing, though.

Nice catch!

Well, there's producthunt, betapage etc.

>> a pivot table that can work on a relational dataset in a SQL server, without downloading the whole table as a join as a first step.

You can do that with PowerPivot + SQL Server Analysis Services, no? Requires SQL Server and SSAS licenses, though.

>> SQL is useful to developers, but you can't expect business users to write complex queries.

True. I remember reading/hearing somewhere that it was originally designed to be used by business people as well, but it didn't really turn out that way.

I wanted to add that QueryStorm isn't just a pretty IDE:) It's a runtime as well. IT people can use it to prepare interactive reports that they can then share with business people.

E.g. you change the value of a cell in Excel, a query is triggered in the background that uses that cell's value as a parameter, and updates an Excel table with the results. The query can use Excel tables and cells as well as outside databases. The user is just interacting with the workbook, without typing any SQL.

I also added a QuickQueries dialog that can generate/run some useful queries. You can use it to do stuff without knowing SQL e.g. find outliers (people whose salary is > +2 stdevs for their jobtitle). The idea is to make it useful to non-techy people and to give techy people ideas of what it can do and a starting point for more complex queries.

It's going slowly. For now, I make enough to cover my expenses, but I earned more as a contractor working for a corp. Some days, though, I earn way more from QueryStorm, I just have to make those days more common.

People seem to like the product well enough, but I'm kinda stumbling my way around marketing and sales. I think it's going to do well, though, I'm getting better at it, and I'm also likely getting reseller partners soon.

I'm also applying for an EU grant which would allow me to hire some sales/marketing people. That would be great since right now it's difficult to focus on specific things (e.g. SEO, Adwords etc...), mostly it's throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

Thank you for buying it!!

I had the same problem. Transitioning from having built the thing to asking people to pay for it felt quite awkward at first. I feel a lot less awkward about it now that I do have paying customers who are happy with it and use it daily. It feels great, when someone who isn't legally obliged to, pays you for something you built because it makes their work easier.

>> how do you find your customers? Especially the enterprise ones?

Haphazardly and slowly thus far:) A couple of enterprise customers actually found me, but my own reach into the enterprise world is not really substantial. Some of my customers are consultancies who work with banks and such so I started talking to a few of them about partnership. It's not something I can completely outsource, but partners could certainly help a lot. We'll see how it goes.

Building an audience is a good idea, although it's easier to do if you have something to show people, I think. I'm not a businessy person (maybe I become), I just enjoyed building it, so that's what I spent time on. That's not to say that I wasn't hoping to make a business out of it, I certainly was, from very early on:)

Well, some things you certainly could, but this really opens up many more possibilities than is obvious at first glance. Another big thing is convenience, which is along the lines of what you said. Single click to open query editor, full autocomplete, star expansion, etc., easy 2-way communication between a db and Excel (instead of the clunky import/export procedures).

There are a ton of areas where this offers benefits, in larger or smaller ways. It can solve problems people don't even recognize.