crrashby

Hi I'm Chris, cofounder of LeadFinch. I'd love to here what you think!

Hi, I'm Chris, co-founder of TaskPipes. I'd love to hear your feedback. We're also happy to get people set up with the service.

No we're not. At the moment we're focussing more on non-devs who already have the data in a csv. It looks like a cool project though.

Hi, I'm the co-founder of TaskPipes. We'd love to here what you think!

Hi, I'm Chris, the cofounder of TaskPipes. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Hi I'm Chris co-founder of numeratr. We've just launched with a few early clients and would love to get your feedback

We've just launched the alpha, you can try online or download as an Excel add-in. We'd love feedback.

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.

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.

All these suggestions would make for a really powerful tool. The issue is how to make it all approachable to non-coders. Almost all the excel users I've talked to don't know how to make macros let alone any more complex code. I think the issue is trying to make these concepts understandable and usable to everyone so users can get started straight away.

Right now companies don't send their employees on VBA courses even though they could work some much more efficiently with a basic knowledge of coding.

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

Interesting stuff. Yeah whats great about excel is there is zero learning needed to get started. Anyone can start typing numbers in the cells then move on to more complex tasks. The problem is, although each step towards building a model in Excel is quite simple the end results can be very unwieldy.

Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?

-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.

Yeah it's still quite early stage.

Well, maybe one day...

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.

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

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

I'll look into it, thanks

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.

Cool. I'm chris@slateforexcel.com btw

We were definitely pursuing the add-on route. Although add-ons can be clunky we felt people would want to switch between the two views quickly and often. For example, if you make a change in the spreadsheet view you might want to see what effect that had on the tree. What do you think?

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

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?