Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

http://www.slateforexcel.com

by crrashby • 13 years ago

182 71 13 years ago

crrashby18• 13 years ago

I've been working on this myself and would really love to get some feedback. Would this be useful for the problems you have with Excel?

bjoerns4• 13 years ago

it's a great idea - much better than the old built-in formula dependency tracker. definitely loving your idea! I've been in the Excel business myself for years (having worked in finance) and always love when someone comes up with a fresh tool for the mighty Excel (yeah, I know most developer's views on Excel...). I've recently started www.spreadgit.com which is a GitHub-like service for spreadsheets. looking forward to playing around with your service!

crrashby18• 13 years ago

It looks really cool, I think the two tools kind of go hand in hand. Sharing sheets and understanding them.

shorbaji3• 13 years ago

It certainly is a good idea.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I've been toying with the idea of having users use a data flow diagram to structure complex spreadsheets. Still have a pre-prototype stage and I'ld love to get your expert feedback on that idea. If interested please drop me a note.

njx• 13 years ago

Great idea! Do you have to upload the spreadsheet? If yes then a big downer. Better if you could release and sell as Excel Plugin

bjoerns4• 13 years ago

hmm, what's wrong with uploading it? I would actually prefer the no-Addin solution: the Excel Addin 'deployment' is a bit messy (with references stuck in the Addin-manager) + no Addins in the Mac world (though I guess that >95% of Excel users are on windows)

bradleyland• 13 years ago

Our product is a reverse auction procurement tool used by large business customers. As you can imagine, we work with a lot of spreadsheets. We have knowledge workers who receive (sometimes complex) Excel documents from customers. A not insignificant amount of time is spent interpreting these sheets so we can understand how a customer evaluates pricing data. This evaluation leads to a bid model, which we use to collect pricing on line items that roll up in to a total-value number.

Really looking forward to trying it out.

cdcarter• 13 years ago

How do you plan to support links between documents. The place I work at now has a very complex budgeting process where each department sends my office their budget spreadsheets and we link them all into an overview that also does things like calculating benefits payments and taxes. There's a lot that can go wrong in that process, and every time I go back and look at a submitted version I find some mistake someone missed.

crrashby18• 13 years ago

Slate will show the cells that are in another document but referenced by the current sheet. However, it would not show any further levels of referenced cells.

So say I reference the value "Total Sales" which is in another sheet. That would show in the the tree but the individual sales that contribute to the total would not be shown.

We wanted people to know where the numbers are coming from but at the same time keep the trees for different sheets and files separate to prevent them becoming too unwieldy and hard to understand.

shorbaji3• 13 years ago

Interesting. As I understand it, you use a spreadsheet as input and then create the data flow diagram. I certainly see how seeing the data flow diagram means better clarity and error-finding. So here is a question for you? What if we take it a step further and have users actually entered their complex spreadsheets in a tidy graphical data flow diagram which mapped back?

crrashby18• 13 years ago

That is where I would love to take this. I think thats a bit more of a leap for the user as it forces them to think in the flow diagram way from the very beginning. I'd really like to see how users react to building a spreadsheet from scratch in this way.

jackgavigan• 13 years ago

Like Livesheets, you mean?

shorbaji3• 13 years ago

Yep. Livesheets more or less.

taeric• 13 years ago

The problem is users like the presentation of a spreadsheet. So far, there seems to have been no evidence of this changing.

My question is why do they like it? My assertion would be because it is visual in how they want it. They are usually less interested in the complicated "how do I get this value" than they are "I want a value to be here." That is, even if it is wrong, they are more interested in seeing the data laid out in a way they specify than they are coming up with a data flow analysis of what they did.

And, really, I'm not sure this is that surprising. Having a tool show you how all of the data is linked together certainly can make for a good understanding of how the data was calculated. May even help fix mistakes. However, the table of data view of the spreadsheet is ultimately what you want. Just with no mistakes.

hleszek• 13 years ago

Any idea of the price ?

crrashby18• 13 years ago

We haven't really decided yet. What would businesses be willing to spend?

jczhang• 13 years ago

mmm they wouldn't unless many individuals push for it. This wouldn't be used by management, so people below would have to push for it. I would recommend some type of freemium model.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

Don't just make a price up. Buy Strategy and Tactics of Pricing immediately, it's a relatively short textbook that will teach you what you need to know.

The headline here is that you're not selling to consumers. You are selling to businesses; if you can demonstrate value then you can ask for a generous fraction of it in your price. With some smart segmentation you can divide the market into a few different groups, some of whom are rare but prepared to pay much more, others who are more common but only prepared to pay less.

kbar13• 13 years ago

try to look at the prezi thing
id: 1100 the reason is: Event [Event type="fontLoadError" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2]

crrashby18• 13 years ago

I'll look into it, thanks

borplk• 13 years ago

Is this an Excel plugin or an independent/standalone software?

crrashby18• 13 years ago

I can be contacted on chris@slateforexcel.com if anyone wants to get in touch btw

pseut2• 13 years ago

From the video, this looks like a graphical spreadsheet debugger. That is a fucking fantastic idea. It's been a while sine I used a lot of excel, but this would have been great.

I think you'd want to target non-programmers who use a lot of excel (so people in "business") and just bring them more debugging features. An excel IDE would be an ambitious potential next step.

crrashby18• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with the second point. Excel has tons of debugging features, too many. It means most people don't know about all the tools and they're all really badly designed. This is about getting rid of all that and creating one new feature, the tree view. Which offers way more functionality on it's own.

thegranderson• 13 years ago

While Excel has SOME debugging features, they really don't work well at ALL for large formulas. I don't need something to help me debug some multiplication.

But when I'm offsetting to an array upon which I'm selecting and summing a subset of these cells with an if-driven sumproduct, and maybe dynamically looking up all of the ranges with more index/matches.... its impossible to look at in the little formula tracing box.

I can't wait to try this out.

graham17762• 13 years ago

We would certainly use this at our company...In the real estate finance world we exclusively use Excel for financial underwriting, and at times, cells and formulas get lost in the fray. As the analyst around here, I know how to audit a spreadsheet just looking at the formula (if I built it...), but the guys in the field using our models have no clue how cell A links to cell B. I vote for online solution, as us corporate types have no ability to download or add software (even as Excel add-ins...) Ugh.

crrashby18• 13 years ago

Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?

graham17762• 13 years ago

I don't personally, but I could imagine our company might. That being said, we use Box and other "insecure" places to upload files. I argue that as long as you have a policy in place that what is uploaded isn't shared without permissions given, I'm sure we wouldn't have problem uploading.

Thinking about it more though, keeping it integrated into excel or offline has its merits. We have 20mb+ financial models that would take forever for your software to churn through.

nostromo• 13 years ago

I love the way you've presented the underlying structure so much, I found myself wishing you would replace the spreadsheet itself!

crrashby18• 13 years ago

Well, maybe one day...

neilk• 13 years ago

Please do this. I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.

zackmorris2• 13 years ago

You are just a small step away from the concepts in Subtext:

http://www.subtext-lang.org

I highly recommend watching the screencasts, especially the demo:

http://www.subtext-lang.org/demo1.html

I have wanted a graphical interface for functional programming in environments like Excel for a long time. In my experience, most of the pseudo-programming that has dominated software engineering (object-oriented/MVC/message-based, patterns, best practices) goes away when you can model something directly.

Nobody has been able to successfully apply proven engineering concepts from, say, electrical engineering or VLSI to software engineering. I think it's because the leap from imperative code is too long.

But nobody has successfully made functional code approachable either, because too often it's contaminated by syntactic sugar that's too symbolic, various handcuffs that make even the simplest tasks arduous (poor handling of global state), or learning curves that can't be scaled when it comes to interacting with real-world time-based data (monads etc).

For the most part Excel has none of these issues. You can stick an imperative macro in the middle of your functional code and it works just fine, as it should in any other functional language (as long as you follow certain rules like, no globals). Then you can write another macro to load CSV data into your spreadsheet, or even spit it out to a folder that has a shell script watching it to transform the data again. I think it's more productive to work in that unix-like manner (of a bunch of small tools that do one thing well, pipelined together), than it would be to try to integrate notions like dynamic data into Excel. But the achilles heal of Excel was always obfuscation.

We need to get away from language when we're thinking about functional programming, and focus more on data and transformations. Slate looks like a great start, kudos!

nazka• 13 years ago

I think you will really love this video : http://worrydream.com/dbx/ It's a conference about programming languages in general. It's interesting, with cool materials, and fun to watch.

Also if you need to have more ideas, you can take a look at the Unreal Engine and Cryengine. They built similar tools to allow artists to code graphically scripts for video games.

Cool idea anyway.

while1• 13 years ago

This looks awesome! I quite often stumble upon the task of automating or porting spreadsheets into code. This is always a pain as it might in some ways be hard to visualize the flow in a chart. This tool would greatly simplify the task. Looks really sweet!

filearts2• 13 years ago

I do financial modelling at a Big4 and can easily see the value of this type of visualization tool.

I wonder if/how you are able to visualize INDEX/MATCH type lookups, SUMPRODUCT and array formulas? Obviously, these types of formulas are not in every model, but for my usecase it would be pretty important.

Also, since others have asked but the answer watn't too clear: is any data uploaded?

You mention that you have plans to move to a model where things happen in reverse: models would be defined as flows and the spreadsheet could be generated. What progress (if any) have you made on that front?

crrashby18• 13 years ago

-A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row.

-None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded.

-We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.

filearts2• 13 years ago

We have some pretty powerful in-hourse tools for visualizing information flow within a given worksheet. It will overlay borders around contiguous blocks of identical (R1C1) formulas and color code based on whether the cell has a value, a formula an off-sheet formula and cross-file formula, etc...

However, where our tools fail, and where your tool really shines is transforming the spreadsheet visual paradigm into something that more closely resembles the intent of the model. Very cool! (I signed up)

rjsamson• 13 years ago

Very cool! I've got two bloated excel spreadsheets that need to be ported to a web app and this looks like it would be really helpful. Is this available yet to use or still in the early stages?

crrashby18• 13 years ago

Yeah it's still quite early stage.

symr• 13 years ago

This looks great!

gadders3• 13 years ago

Oh good. An autoplaying YouTube video with audio.

closes tab

crrashby18• 13 years ago

OK I've disabled the autoplay again. I was just trying to get people to watch the video.

gadders3• 13 years ago

It's a pet peeve ;-)

Good luck with the product though!

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

Oh don't you dare! Run an a/b test first, before you disable autoplay. If autoplay gets more signups then keep it. You're not here to be our friend and drink tea, you're running a business.

From a design point of view, I LOVE your desaturated forest look with the logo. It's all very memorable

davidgerard• 13 years ago

WARNING: CONTAINS AUTOPLAY SOUND.

analog31• 13 years ago

An Excel to LabVIEW converter. ;-)

It seems like a really cool idea. For better or worse, Excel has emerged as the de facto "programming" tool for small scale computation and database tasks. It's an annoyance that you can't see your entire program at once, especially for checking correctness, finding bugs, and understanding someone else's work.

nether• 13 years ago

I was JUST thinking about something like this a week ago. I termed it "formula explorer" and was going to ask some people if something like it was in Excel 2013 (at work we're on 2003). This would be great for my mechanical engineering work. We often have formulas that reference many sheets with many constituent formulas. To check them I usually have to create another sheet that shows the flow of values concisely on one sheet, basically a manual version of what Slate does. This tool would automate that, looks fantastic.

lancefisher• 13 years ago

Wow! Microsoft needs to buy this. Great addition to excel.

epo• 13 years ago

The problem with Excel spreadsheets is that the overwhelming majority of users are not programmers or engineers, they are clerical workers with no real understanding of what they are doing. Knowledge, such as it is, is passed on in a monkey see, monkey do, fashion, producing imitation without insight.

This proposed tool is for engineers, not clerks. You download it and use it locally right? Because if it requires the spreadsheet to be uploaded then that is another technical hurdle and one which breaches most people's security requirements.

Excel already does most of this, the problem is that people can't comprehend what it is telling them, your tool is no different.

crrashby18• 13 years ago

Almost all Excel users are not programmers, you're definitely right. If by clerical workers you mean people who are just entering data into the sheet or reading an output then, yes, they don't need to understand what the sheet is doing.

However there are loads of people who build there own sheets: analysts, consultants, managers, marketing, accountants and yes engineers. These are the people who spend the most time using excel. Excel let's you build a very complex model formula by formula. It's often a model more complex than you might be able to map out initially. Whilst they are not programmers they are still smart enough to understand the sheets they've built. The issue is Excel right now is so opaque about what its doing and where the numbers come from. It makes this task much harder than it needs to be.

sesm• 13 years ago

Great! I hope one day someone will make a similar plugin for LibreOffice Calc.

IAmFledge• 13 years ago

This doesn't seem worlds away from LiveSheets.

http://livesheets.com/

Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

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