Really cool.I've been working on semantic models for sometime.
At my work we do loads of spreadsheets+docs+ other things which are supposed to communicate ideas.But unfortunately it never seems to communicate the ideas as is.Take an example.I were to a market to buy some vegetables.As soon as the shop keeper says '1 Kg is Rs 20', it immediately communicates how much i'll need to pay.Its because we all share the common formal semantic for maths we get to ship ideas easily.But not so in financial software(where i work).Ideas take spreadsheets+word-docs+experts to have a call on!Can't it be simpler?Like the visual realization of the spread sheet example shows it can be simpler!
Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#12I wonder if this type of visualisation could be used to understand non-trivial functional programs that aren't Excel. Reminds me of Subtext: http://www.subtext-lang.org/
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#13We've just launched the alpha, you can try online or download as an Excel add-in. We'd love feedback.
Here's a chance for Microsoft's best ever product to be even bestest!
It looks awesome. Actuaries will love you guys.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#14Looks like you changed your domain name. Probably best to shed that "excel" name.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#15interested in the technology stack behind this. How do you make an app that works inside Excel? Is there an add-in or add-on development? What about supporting older versions of Excel?
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#16interested in the technology stack behind this. How do you make an app that works inside Excel? Is there an add-in or add-on development? What about supporting older versions of Excel?
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.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#17This is great work, but I think for most heavy, advanced Excel users, the visualization is much harder to understand and navigate than the actual spreadsheet. And that's for fairly simple examples you have in videos and demos - real world finance models are orders of magnitude more complex and this visualization will have to go on for pages, entirely out of the visual context in which cells are placed.
Trying to visualize an entire sheet is fairly silly as a paradigm, because the only sheets that are easy to visualize this way are too simple for this to be useful. And Excel is a heavily visual environment already, where the visualization is controlled by the user. Context-sensitive visualization that fits within the workflow would seem to be much better. As it stands, this is optimized for technical people who don't really use Excel enough to be good at it, yet have to debug simple workbooks authored by others. I don't think that's a big enough market.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#18I (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…
> normally financial or market sizing ones
A-ha. Here's the hidden assumption. You're looking at sheets that have a handful of parameters/assumptions and span out their consequences. (You want to stake out the market of people selling Monte Carlo add-ins.)
Many people use spreadsheets as ad hoc accretion calculators/graphers/explorers. This very week -- I estimated about a hundred separate generalized-extreme-value models in Mathematica (working basically by hand to import data from Excel; but this because there was a lot of careful culling), then exported a number of statistics from the distributions. Then I spent a couple of hours a day later looking at scatterplots in Excel -- trying transformations, whatever worked -- that helped me show how those models isolated a particular global feature across the hundred-or-so distributions.
I was looking at your demo and shaking my head -- "is this for cash flow models? But it doesn't even have features for stochastic parameters..." But I guess I see it.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#19Ok just tried the add-in in Excel 2007, some comments:
1) Everything's really slow. Installation's very, very slow and not responsive and the add-in seems to add considerably to Excel start up time.
2) No ribbon, just three buttons on Add-Ins tab, it looks a bit unprofessional.
3) It doesn't really work - when I click on "Show sheet" it sends the browser to some local file slate.html in temp directory, which seems to have just:
Need Help?
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Double click to show full tree again.
There are no formulae on this sheet to display
Contact support@slateforexcel.com for support queries or feedback.
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Where's the stuff I saw in the video? Was that Mac-only?
4) I'd look into using Excel-DNA/NetOffice instead of VSTO, which requires a runtime. That makes it easier for business units to subscribe directly without going through the IT and the whole procurement process, etc.
Re: Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
#20Ok just tried the add-in in Excel 2007, some comments: 1) Everything's really slow. Installation's very, very slow and not responsive and the add-in seems to add considerably to Excel start up time. 2) No ribbon, just three buttons on Add-Ins tab, it looks a bit unprofessional. 3) It doesn't really work - when I click on "Show sheet" it sends the browser to some local file slate.html in temp directory, which seems to…
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