The world needs a better spreadsheet • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#91

Post by F_J_H » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 5:22 AM UTC

beachy wrote: post #15

Chyzwar wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

But they can also build a lot of really useful things too, and many do, and create a ton of value.

The same can be said for any programming language/tool. Reminds me of this quote attributed to Doug Gwyn:

"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#92

Post by slededit » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

bboreham wrote: post #59

spitfire wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be Lotus Improv? I used Improv and Quantrix on NeXTStep. Quantrix on OSX is still a secret weapon of mine.

I don't think so. They all had code-names - 123 for Windows was Rockport; Improv was Back Bay and the one I'm talking about was another place, but the exact name escapes me. I believe Improv was written in Objective-C while the one I mean was in C++.

C++ is impressive for 1991. Excel was still K&R C at that time.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#93

Post by hackuser » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:37 AM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #57

Charged a close friend $3,000 for a few days worth of work?

Close friend lowballed you on three days of work?

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#94

Post by michaeloblak » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 9:55 AM UTC

mmonihan wrote: post #16

chowes wrote: post #11

I 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…

For quick CRUD apps, where a spreadsheet is your admin panel I recommend Sheetsu.com (I'm founder). You get REST API, from your spreadsheet. What you do with it is up to you.

We see a huge peak with agencies and freelancers using our service, just to avoid building admin panels for a client. Easy, clean & simple.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#95

Post by pweissbrod » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 4:35 AM UTC

markoutso wrote: post #12

I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company. It's not even good marketing.

Nailed it. I started out surprised he would charge 3k for making some cheap lotus notes crud thing he wrote in 4 hours and couldnot deploy in heroku in 8? Then there was this free associating on a bunch of unrelated concepts topped off with some kind of general axiom.

Nice work getting 3k for that kind of project, you're a better business man than me. If someone like that came my way I would direct them to Google forms or spreadsheet for free.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#96

Post by balls187 » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 11:57 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #72

balls187 wrote: post #57

Charged a close friend $3,000 for a few days worth of work?

$100 x 8 x 3 = $2400, and that's for just 8 hours a day with a pretty gentle contracting rate.

$100 per hour for a Rails crud app?

For a close friend?

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#97

Post by balls187 » Sun, Jan 22, 2017, 12:01 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #93

balls187 wrote: post #57

Charged a close friend $3,000 for a few days worth of work?

Close friend lowballed you on three days of work?

I make more than enough money from my day job, such that I don't need to nickle and dime my close friends.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#98

Post by jon49 » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 1:19 AM UTC

I built an app in Excel 5 years ago. It was a heat map for events, for stadiums, theaters, etc. I would build the static CSS/HTML and write out the files from Excel. It is still in use today. After having stopped working on it for a couple of years a minor bug was brought up to me recently. Luckily I had a windows computer again with Excel installed. Excel is a great platform for building prototype apps, or even long lived apps - especially 10 years ago. It is amazing the power that Excel has. But, a proper app should be built in JavaScript with a solid back end (F# being my fave). Although developing in Excel was a bit clunky it was amazingly easy to get beautiful customer interfaces and beautiful forms.