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Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

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Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#71
post #64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major version over the last 15 years has made some very minor usability improvements and added as many regressions .

I wholeheartedly disagree. The usability improvements have been major for me, and I can't think of any regressions. Again, I think Microsoft has to (and is doing arguably well at) focusing on the lowest common denominator of users.

Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad.

When you format the number format of the axis of a chart, you now need two steps, adding the new numberformat to a list instead of applying it directly, it serves no purpose.

When you open a spreadsheet programatically it now opens in the background of the current sheet so you have to manually look up for it instead of opening at the front as before.

When you want to save to file it is now a two steps process, where you have to select filesystem as opposed to cloud stuff then you can save. I don't use MSFT's cloud services, this is a regression to me.

When I open a spreadsheet from an email, I now have to click the edit mode at the top to be able to do anything with it.

Microsoft making it increasingly difficult to for someone to install addin or execute macros, you now have to disable many security settings. More pain for my ass, particularly if I need to do this with my colleagues computers.

Lots of small things like that, that balance the many nano-improvements that appeared over 20 years.

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#73

This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter ( https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com ) and Spreadsheet Web ( https://www.spreadsheetweb.com ) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid ( https://www.calculoid.com ), Calconic ( https…

Are all these using a full excel calculation engine behind (like SpreadsheetGear or else)?

I always thought that if I had lots of spare time, a good project would be to take a spreadsheet, specify the input cells and output cells, analyse the logic of the formulas in between, and generate automatically some code that replicates this calculation and can be compiled.

That way you can preserve the logic in excel so a business user can own it, while getting all the performance and scalability of compiled code.

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#74

This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter ( https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com ) and Spreadsheet Web ( https://www.spreadsheetweb.com ) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid ( https://www.calculoid.com ), Calconic ( https…

Do any of these enable a drop dead simple web api to access the spreadsheet?

For example, simple urls that could GET the data for a sheet, a row, selected area, etc. This could even be useful for non-developers.

Last time I checked MS made made oauth part of accessing sheets in excel, which seems to add too much addiotnal complexity. It seems like a no auth option would be useful, and even for protected spreadsheets the experience could be much less complex.

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#75

This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter ( https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com ) and Spreadsheet Web ( https://www.spreadsheetweb.com ) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid ( https://www.calculoid.com ), Calconic ( https…

I wonder if there is a self hosted version of any of this stuff...

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#76
post #73

This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter ( https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com ) and Spreadsheet Web ( https://www.spreadsheetweb.com ) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid ( https://www.calculoid.com ), Calconic ( https…

Are all these using a full excel calculation engine behind (like SpreadsheetGear or else)? I always thought that if I had lots of spare time, a good project would be to take a spreadsheet, specify the input cells and output cells, analyse the logic of the formulas in between, and generate automatically some code that replicates this calculation and can be compiled. That way you can preserve the logic in excel so a bu…

Shameless plug: we (https://sheetjs.com/) offer that as one of our paid builds. In conjunction with our JS parser https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx , you can modify cell values / formulae and recalculate the workbook (or individual expressions) in the web browser or nodejs

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#77
post #2

I'm surprised MS Office development seems to have just...stopped. Powerpoint can't import an SVG (it turns it into a low res raster image). Powerpoint can't export SVG either, if I want to use a Powerpoint diagram in a web page. I opened a JSON file in Excel expecting to see nested values and nope, it doesn't support that file format. Office isn't even available in the Windows app store. When Microsoft's going full s…

eh? i’ve just last month done both those things. svg no raster and direct json import

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#78
post #48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird. My SVGs do not get rasterized when resizing. I just tried (Powerpoint 2019) and I can resize, move, turn, mirror, cut etc. and they stay in vector form.

Hrm thanks for the feedback (and sorry for being snappy). I had a play and it looks like some things work and others don't: - Copying and pasting from a vector app into Powerpoint makes a bitmap import - Dragging an SVG file from Explorer into Powerpoint works properly

correct. copy paste even from a vector app comes in as bitmap. you have to use file->import or drag drop.

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#79

This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter ( https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com ) and Spreadsheet Web ( https://www.spreadsheetweb.com ) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid ( https://www.calculoid.com ), Calconic ( https…

I wonder if there is a self hosted version of any of this stuff...

We (Calcapp) offer self-hosting as part of our corporate plan.

Re: Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages

#80
post #71
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly disagree. The usability improvements have been major for me, and I can't think of any regressions. Again, I think Microsoft has to (and is doing arguably well at) focusing on the lowest common denominator of users.

Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad. When you format the number format of the axis of a chart, you now need two steps, adding the new numberformat to a list instead of applying it directly, it serves no purpose. When you open a spreadsheet programatically it now opens in the ba…

> Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad.

Paste it as an EMF and it works perfectly. EMF is the Microsoft alternative to an SVG.

Some professional third-party tools append metadata to that EMF to allow for easy tracking of the original source file. So the user can customize formatting in Excel and use PPT just to build the output

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