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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

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

antigirl wrote: post #31
Vaslo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.

Fair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.

Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does.

Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability.

Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel.

The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?

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

#82

Post by davidpolberger »

cm2187 wrote: post #73
davidpolberger wrote: post #22

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…

The Calculoid people have publicly disclosed (https://github.com/calculoidapp/calculoidapp.github.io/wiki/...) they they're using this library for evaluating formulas:

https://silentmatt.com/javascript-expression-evaluator/

Through that library, they support a limited number of functions, which map more closely to the built-in Math object of JavaScript than to Excel.

We (Calcapp) have a custom-written compiler, which our server uses as a library for checking formulas and producing JavaScript code. In 2016, we changed our formula syntax to be largely compatible with what Excel and other spreadsheets use (https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2016/06/02/formula-syntax.html).

We support 281 formula functions, most of them compatible with what spreadsheets offer (https://www.calcapp.net/learn/functions.html). We have around a thousand unit tests verifying that we get the same results as Excel.

Thanks to our extensive function library, importing spreadsheets is often straight-forward (https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2017/06/14/convert.html). (We don't do a good job of supporting table look-ups, though, and we will soon turn our focus towards solving that problem.)

Our function library is released under the MIT license and is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/davidpolberger/formulajs

It is a fork of an existing library (formulajs) and includes a fair number of bug fixes and improvements.

At runtime, apps make use of a dependency graph generated by the compiler to ensure that calculations aren't run needlessly. As far as I'm aware, this is the same technique used by all spreadsheets.

It would be straightforward to analyze a workbook and build a dependency graph to determine inputs and outputs. From there, an app could be generated. The only issue is inferring the user interface -- labels often appear to the left of the input and output cells, and while this could be used as a heuristic, it wouldn't be perfect. I've toyed with the idea of using machine learning to do a better job of inferring a user interface.

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

#83

Post by davidpolberger »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #74
davidpolberger wrote: post #22

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…

I haven't tried these, but they claim to do what you want:

https://sheety.co

https://sheetsu.com

https://sheetdb.io

https://sheetlabs.com/

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

#84

Post by cm2187 »

airstrike wrote: post #80
cm2187 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 format…

Still pasted as image. If someone needs to modify it at the last minute in the poweroint you are screwed.

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

#85

Post by nailer »

smt88 wrote: post #65
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who work with data use Excel and JSON. Not most Excel users, but about as many as who know what VLOOKUP is.

Excel is huge in finance, accounting, and marketing. I don't know why anyone in those fields would routinely use JSON files. If there's JSON somewhere that's relevant, a dev will usually just change output to CSV or something.

You don't know people in finance who use JSON? Have you heard of R, SciPy or NumPy?

Additionally data science / stats folk use JSON and Excel too.

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

#86

Post by airstrike »

cm2187 wrote: post #84
airstrike wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 format…

Still pasted as image. If someone needs to modify it at the last minute in the poweroint you are screwed.

Yes, it's a trade-off. For complex charts that rely on lots of data outside of the exact output, you can't really embed charts into PPT.

Plus, you can always ungroup the image and it will turn into shapes and textboxes if you need a quick last minute typo fix

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

#87

Post by cm2187 »

airstrike wrote: post #86
cm2187 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still pasted as image. If someone needs to modify it at the last minute in the poweroint you are screwed.

Yes, it's a trade-off. For complex charts that rely on lots of data outside of the exact output, you can't really embed charts into PPT. Plus, you can always ungroup the image and it will turn into shapes and textboxes if you need a quick last minute typo fix

But we are talking about a table here. There is really no good reason not to leave the format. All formatting in excel map to a formatting in ppt. And it worked fine only a couple of versions ago!

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

#88

Post by davidpolberger »

netfl0 wrote: post #32
davidpolberger wrote: post #22

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…

Your website JavaScript was ruining my browser history. I had more then 10 entries and could not go “back”. Just a friendly heads-up.

This issue should now be fixed. Thanks again for reporting it!

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

#89

Post by Digitalgrub »

airstrike wrote: post #67
tiagoalves wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started Publisheet, the idea was that it would allow users to create static, web-based reports from their spreadsheets, including textual information that would be written as Markdown (with a WYSIWYG editor) directly in one or more cells. I thought that it would be an easy way to create complete financial reports, for instance. The landing page's images still reflect that. But as soon as it launched, I noticed…

> including textual information that would be written as Markdown (with a WYSIWYG editor) directly in one or more cells. I thought that it would be an easy way to create complete financial reports, for instance. The landing page's images still reflect that. > But as soon as it launched, I noticed that no one was using it for text-heavy reports. I think the issue with that approach is that text-heavy reports don't per…

> If something existed for Excel + PowerPoint...

Isn't that SlideShare you're asking for? If not can you explain more please?

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #74
davidpolberger wrote: post #22

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…

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