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Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

useslate.com

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Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

#3

Post by shubb »

crrashby wrote: post #2

We've just launched the alpha, you can try online or download as an Excel add-in. We'd love feedback.

This is cool, I'll be sharing it with a bunch of people. But you might want to share the demo link https://www.useslate.com/use so that people instantly try it out. Not so much explanation on that page to make them bite though.

Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

#5

Post by ScottWhigham »

Congrats - seems very interesting.

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.

Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

#6

Post by viggity »

I (being a developer) really like the concept, but I'm curious what they've done to verify the 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.

Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

#8

Post by f292 »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #5

Congrats - seems very interesting. 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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

#9

Post by f292 »

viggity wrote: post #6

I (being a developer) really like the concept, but I'm curious what they've done to verify the 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…

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).
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