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Worth clarifying that we don't do any of this - we absolutely don't scrape the data of your 1st degree connections or anyone else; only leads that you explicitly query.

Email addresses are then verified using sources in the public domain.

I agree that this is all certainly worth emphasising further and I think we could do with further clarification points in the FAQs.

Finally, we originally built this as an internal tool, but decided to wrap it up as a public facing one.

Our users really are across a bunch of different industries. That's the thing - this is such a widespread problem that it's not constrained to one space. Data from Saleforce -> Mixpanel; eBay -> Shopify; NationBuilder -> centralised data warehouses are some examples.

Thanks for asking.

We're very much focussed on automating the process of getting rows and rows of data out of one system and into another. (e.g. transfer all of today's sales data from one platform to another)

IFTTT is much more event-based (e.g. when I receive an email from person x, send me a text)

Thanks for sharing!

The focus is much more on people who are currently running existing, manual processes in spreadsheets (e.g. monthly reporting) and has much less of a database element. For example, we don't do any of the "loading" stage in a typical ETL process.

This is an awesome concept- I always find myself trying to get the best deals. The biggest issue for me is the upfront fee. A percentage of final savings would be far preferable.

Thanks for the feedback. The big pain point we are focussing on is when you are given someone else's spreadsheet that you are not familiar with. It then can take hours to get your head around how they have put it together.

In this regard, Slate is most useful as way of semi-automatically documenting the spreadsheet.

We made the Iron Man example specifically for HN - possibly not the best thing to pitch big financial firms with - fair point!

We think a lot of the value in Slate will lie in the ability to alter the level of detail you can see in the model. One of the really exciting ideas we have is to allow you to group together nodes in a tree to form a "parent node" representing some higher level functionality (e.g. by geographical region as you suggest, maybe EMEA forecast for example) . Then there will be the option to take the general overview of the spreadsheet, or dive down into the details.

Thanks for your comments - really useful.

Sorry you did not find it helpful for the sheet you tried it on. We have not yet implemented a way of showing 2D nodes in an intuitive manner and this is one of our focuses for the next release.

You mention context - I think this presents possibly one of the biggest barriers to adoption. We included the ability to jump back to the cell in Excel as a result of similar feedback. There is definitely a lot more that can be done though.

You also allude to where we think Slate can be really powerful - documentation. If we were to implement the ability to annotate and group together nodes in Slate, you can give a general overview of how the spreadsheet is working, with the option to dive deeper and investigate the nitty gritty, if needs be. All too often you are given someone else's spreadsheet with no context, and this is where we think further value lies.

Would love to take this conversation to email to discuss further. I'm fraser@useslate.com

We have had a couple of larger firms suggest this as an option they would prefer, but moving quickly in this direction is the biggest problem though. Thanks!

Point taken! Will fix this.

What we have found is that one of the biggest problems in the BI space is the fact people are not able to code and resort to some of the horrific formulae we see. But agreed - including macros would add a huge new layer of complexity!

Good point. We have had some issues with corporate security, especially in larger organisations, and are looking at alternatives. Moving to cloud software could be an option, but big financial firms are even less open to that that what we are currently building!

Great would really like to hear what you think. My email is fraser@useslate.com if you have any feedback.

The add-in is currently bundled with all its dependencies so it will install quicker once you have downloaded it. Some of the bulkier files include the Chromium Embedded Framework dlls which we decided to include to get the slick animations.

We're the cofounders of Slate. We've just released a stable beta - let us know what you think!

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

Thanks for the support and advice! Most of the big financial firms are at least 2 years away from adopting cloud software, so if we are to target these as our customer, then it would appear as though the add-in would be the sensible route.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

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

The local version of Slate is a standard C# addin; the cloud version uses most of the same C# and Python. All of the visualisation is currently done in html, css + js.

The add-in should work back to Excel 2007.

For the cloud version, we are mainly using C#, Python + JavaScript; and generate the tree by firstly accessing the internal XML of the spreadsheet file.

We are former oil and gas analysts and found that interpreting and understanding spreadsheets is an incredibly time consuming task. We have spoken to dozens of financial analysts (whom we have discovered are our primary user) and have found out that the problem is amplified by an order of magnitude for them! They spend literally hours deciphering complexity in spreadsheets. FYI, we are mainly targeting those who are in Excel for more than 70% of the working day and developing models (normally financial or market sizing ones).

Thanks for the feedback. I am one of the co-founders.

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.

Not meaning to hijack the post, but I am currently working on a solution for error spotting in Excel- we really feel that this is one of the other huge problems with spreadsheets. Collaboration intrinsically leads to "lost in translation" errors (see JP Morgan's recent blunder) and these are difficult to identify, especially when you are not the creator of the spreadsheet. We are at http://www.slateforexcel.com