It exists already. It's called MS Access.
The world needs a better spreadsheet
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#22Perhaps, In the end, the best piece of software is the one you never had to build in the first place. -- The Article Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? -- SICP I think the real uncanny valley here lies in maintaining software, not designing it. Business needs change over time and software must adapt. I th…
OP. This is a great point. The activation cost for you to respond to support calls is probably more than the company would be willing to pay you. Which is why SaaS businesses with support teams that benefit from scale are the de facto model for these businesses. I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests. I get a ton of requests related to lists of collec…
> I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests.
Yes, and it's called Salesforce (or Dynamics if you like more pain than Salesforce already causes).
I have better things to do than write a full front-to-back webapp to organize garbage scattered around in spreadsheets, so it's been a lifesaver since I can create a new object or field in a couple clicks (and if I need to write some custom UI or backend code I still have the option to do so).
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#23I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps. The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the fea…
OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while. I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc. What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility. However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data…
Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users.
That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :)
Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks.
I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#24It exists already. It's called MS Access.
Except Access has many of the same issues as Excel. You can work around some of the nastier stuff like file locking by using liked database files and having everyone save their own copy of the "frontend" database file, but it's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth (and oh god is it slooow).
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#25Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every custo…
Spreadsheets changes lives like mine. Especially 123. The second most .exe used on the pc, behind doom
123 put extreme power in the hands of skilled users. If you mastered print code strings it provided for many promotions and tech opportunities. Even today the spreadsheet is the Letherman or slide rule of old time geeks.
I still have a 123 startup disk for my compaq ( no hard disk. 2 floppy version. )
123 changed many people's lives. Truly.
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thing that good spreadsheet application with seamless integration with web and with collaboration tooling would be interesting. Decent scripting with something Julia and some kind of build in Jupyter notebook would be exciting to use. Integrated version control where each document lives in own repo that you can shared as just link shpreadsheet:://user.myNewspreadsheet Excel is relict of old ages: slow, bug ridden,…
I think of spreadsheets as like q-tips. Apparently the one thing that the manufacturers of q-tips tell you not to do is to stick them in your orifices. Yet the number one actual use of q-tips is people cleaning gunk from their ears. People build the most insane, unmaintainable, insecure messes using spreadsheets - because they can.
And you can FAST. What else is there for quick and dirty stuff????
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while. I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc. What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility. However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data…
Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users. That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :) Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapie…
Salesforce is a great solution for stupid CRUD apps that require some custom code here or there. A year ago I started with 8 users, now I'm at 40 and counting - I don't have to waste time developing a front-to-back web application to keep track of garbage that was stored in spreadsheets, and my users get rapid turnaround on most changes (hey, add this new object or field please!).
And if your users don't need to access a lot of different "types" of data (objects) the $25/mo "App Cloud" license is a cheap way to get going.
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#28"The world needs a better spreadsheet"
I read this when I was a teen (as that's long ago). It was at a time Lotus was going to launch Improv in 1993! Improv was the attempt made by a very smart team at Lotus to reconquer the crowd that went to Excel.
But as you can guess, the great product never found its market (or never grew beyond a niche) and was killed a few years later.
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#29Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every custo…
As I very vaguely recall the initial iteration(s) of the Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 weren't great. The real killer though was probably Microsoft's bundling into Microsoft Office. That cemented the use of the entire suite of Microsoft products even when, at a given point in time, they may not have been best in category. As I recall, Lotus made some purchases to try to follow the same strategy but it was too late b…
Lotus went straight to OS/2, because Windows was a toy. Oops.
Around 1991 they had an all-new cross-platform super-product under development, but it crashed and burned and they had to plough on with 123.
I did a lot of the low-level GUI coding for the Open Look and Motif versions of 123. Fun times.
Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet
#30I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps. The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the fea…
> The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none
Interesting. I'm working on a product based on a similar premise, for end-users, but focused on financial services.
I'm curious, did you try pitching to customers, or just investors?