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Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

useslate.com

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Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#21

Post by f292 »

roel_v wrote: post #17

OK here is my feedback. First some superficial stuff: Installshield is not going to fly with the market you want to make real money off, i.e. big organisations who want to deploy through Active Directory. The Office addin installer can be put as a merge module into an MSI, that will make the overall install experience much slicker. The instructions on the web page that opens after installation say to look in tab 'Add…

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

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#22

Post by f292 »

kfk wrote: post #20
ahtomski wrote: post #15

Have you got anyone in finance actually using this at the moment? I imagine there's a pretty high bar to entry in terms of security/stability for them to even give a product like this a test drive.

Finance here. Just gave it a try, it won’t fly. There are 2 types of finance: those that take a spreadsheet as it is and just “use” it; those that read formulas. Neither of the 2 is going to get any value from this. On the other hand, finance has a lot of drill downs going on (think going from global to region to country to entity etc.) and I like the way he is displaying data trees going out of Excel for it.

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.

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#23

Post by arethuza »

Some feedback:

- Getting the license key was a bit slow, I went through the process of getting a reminder before the original turned up (I guess I'm impatient - but it's annoying when I had to hunt around my Junk Mail/Deleted Items to see where the license had gone). Why bother with a license for a demo?

- I find the appearance is too different to Excel so is a bit jarring

- The animations are cute, but not sure that they actually aid usability

- Although my initial reaction wasn't that positive it did actually grow on me but I think it needs an obvious immediate impact to demonstrate a clear benefit over the standard Trace Precedents/Dependents

- I can actually think of one scenario where this would have been pretty useful. I was designing a industrial modelling application that had been "prototyped" as an extremely complex Excel application - I had to spend a lot of time showing people that the calculations in the spreadsheet weren't what people thought they were - so having some way of automatically generated documentation of parts of a spreadsheet would have been useful.

Overall - not bad, but I think you really need to nail the exact pain points this would be useful for. Maybe also drop the Tony Stark/Avengers example - it's cute but might not appeal to your target market.

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#24

Post by kfk »

f292 wrote: post #22
kfk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finance here. Just gave it a try, it won’t fly. There are 2 types of finance: those that take a spreadsheet as it is and just “use” it; those that read formulas. Neither of the 2 is going to get any value from this. On the other hand, finance has a lot of drill downs going on (think going from global to region to country to entity etc.) and I like the way he is displaying data trees going out of Excel for it.

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 th…

Hi, then if you are building this you should put a real database in the middle and work on hierarchies, structures, mappings, comparisons and drill downs. You should allow multiple users to pull data from said db into their Excel. You should do this better than the existing (crappy) solutions like HFM or BPC. If you do that, I see quite a lot of value for finance-controlling.

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#25

Post by f292 »

arethuza wrote: post #23

Some feedback: - Getting the license key was a bit slow, I went through the process of getting a reminder before the original turned up (I guess I'm impatient - but it's annoying when I had to hunt around my Junk Mail/Deleted Items to see where the license had gone). Why bother with a license for a demo? - I find the appearance is too different to Excel so is a bit jarring - The animations are cute, but not sure that…

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!

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#26

Post by arethuza »

f292 wrote: post #25
arethuza wrote: post #23

Some feedback: - Getting the license key was a bit slow, I went through the process of getting a reminder before the original turned up (I guess I'm impatient - but it's annoying when I had to hunt around my Junk Mail/Deleted Items to see where the license had gone). Why bother with a license for a demo? - I find the appearance is too different to Excel so is a bit jarring - The animations are cute, but not sure that…

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…

"It then can take hours"

I've spent weeks trying to understand a large spreadsheet. Mind you, a lot of that was persuading people that I was correct when I said what it was actually doing was at odds with what they though it should have been doing!

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#27

Post by rahimnathwani »

f292 wrote: post #12
ainla wrote: post #11

It's a great idea, but I've been working in multiple enterprise excel hells and most of the places use macros, because the simple stuff just does not allow needed complexity. Now try to visualize that...

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!

I much prefer reading Excel spreadsheet with complex formulae, than those with complex macros. It's much easier to follow things around and literally 'see' what's going on.

Parentheses FTW!

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#29

Post by grayclhn »

Very minor detail, but numbers should be right aligned "tabular" numbers in your flowcharts. Digits like to be vertically aligned. I'm on Linux, so I don't know if that's just an artifact of the example on your homepage or if it's baked into the plugin too --- but that goes for the default settings in the plugin too.

Re: Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet

#30

Post by kristopherwong »

Here's my 2cents and maybe a bit of repeats from earlier comments:

Design the experience for the target audience... You are not going to be selling this to consumers but rather targeting businesses... Take an example such as budgeting, inventory, operations or something similar that businesses will instantly recognize.

There was a comment about making this an MSI... I fully agree. I work as a software asset manager and when we select software if they don't come in mis format, we always look for alternatives. Make documentation for the mis to easily deploy it via AD, SCCMs and common deployment platforms.... This ensures that the employees adopt it quickly and the decision maker looks like a super star.

Change the call to action Something more compiling.

Anyways I think there is applications in enterprise as I get spreadsheets all the time... I usually have to spend 20min to 3 hours trying to decipher what they actually do.

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