

DataNitro is now $99 - karamazov
https://datanitro.com/blog/new_price.html

======
dia80
I've had a shocking experience of this product (abysmal performance, memory
leaks and poor support). It's basically a poorly wrapped version of pyxll[1]
which I would recommend instead. It's not production software.

[1] [http://www.pyxll.com/](http://www.pyxll.com/)

~~~
sheetjs
It's not trying to target power users. They would learn VBA.

It's not trying to target data processing. People who care enough would use a
library like xlrd/xlwt.

It's not trying to go after big industries like finance. It's easy to interop
outside of excel and from within VBA, and most hedge funds and banks have
their own solutions already.

This is specifically targeted to the casual people who want to do some in-
Excel scripting but don't want to learn VBA. In that light, the product seems
way over-priced (and probably should be in the $5-10 range) and unlikely to
ever be used in a production setting.

~~~
karamazov
I disagree with your points:

| It's not trying to target power users. They would learn VBA.

Most of our users know VBA and prefer not to use it. (Programmers who've ever
tried VBA are familiar with its downsides; I won't go into them here.) Python
is a significantly more productive language than VBA; our clients can
typically write programs 10x faster in Python than in VBA. More importantly, a
large class of programs that are trivial to write in Python using open-source
libraries would take months or years of development time in VBA.

| It's not trying to target data processing. People who care enough would use
a library like xlrd/xlwt.

xlrd/xlwt are very good for a subset of what DataNitro does: specifically,
static processing (input and output) of Excel files. They don't support more
complicated use cases (for example, building an interface to an external data
source for non-technical end users, or a spreadsheet that runs analyses based
on user input).

| It's not trying to go after big industries like finance.

We have a number of users in finance.

| It's easy to interop outside of excel and from within VBA

I wouldn't say it's easy, especially for people who haven't done it before.
It'll certainly take more than two hours to figure out, at which point the
license has already paid for itself.

| most hedge funds and banks have their own solutions already.

This is true, but internal solutions are frequently less flexible and harder
to use than DataNitro; at the least, this makes them unsuitable for work done
by non-developers (e.g. quants). It commonly saves developers time as well.

| This is specifically targeted to the casual people who want to do some in-
Excel scripting but don't want to learn VBA.

Given the option, most people prefer to use Python over VBA; this is true even
if (in fact, especially if) they know both languages.

| In that light, the product seems way over-priced (and probably should be in
the $5-10 range) and unlikely to ever be used in a production setting.

DataNitro is used both in production and as a prototyping system by a number
of firms.

------
waterlion
I really really don't want to grammar-nitpick (this looks like an amazing
product) but 'less bugs' kind of hints at low quality. If I were you (and I'm
not) I would replace that with 'fewer bugs' or whatever.

~~~
dmm
Quick! Somebody tell Shakespeare how english grammar works.

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act III, scene I

FLAMINIUS: ..."Has friendship such a faint and milky heart, It turns in less
than two nights? O you gods,"...

~~~
waterlion
I'm not soliciting an argument.

But... I would argue that this is consistent because 'two nights' isn't a
countable quantity, it's an 'un-countable' period of time.

Although you could argue the opposite is true because 'two' does look very
much like counting.

~~~
dmm
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less)

Less has always been used in English with countable nouns.

~~~
waterlion
It depends what you're trying to achieve.

I took pains to say that I wasn't asserting any universal truth about the
English language. I'm not taking a position on whether it has or hasn't been
used in English or any other language, with or without nouns, countable or
otherwise. I gave my perspective about my reaction to reading 'less bugs' and
suggested what I would do were I the author (acknowledging as I did it, that I
amn't).

You might be able to present me with evidence and thereby change my internal
grammar (I'm sure everyone except Chomsky has their own individual version),
but it might be a few years before those words no longer triggered the same
response.

I'm game if you are.

(Edit: dmm edited his comment to remove the words "Is there any evidence I
could present that you would accept?" from this comment's parent. For shame!)

~~~
dmm
> For shame!

You're the one making BS grammar claims and refusing to own up to it when
you're called on it.

~~~
waterlion
I haven't made a single grammar claim. I have, quite deliberately, not taken a
prescriptive approach. Please quote and prove me wrong.

Are you saying that my 'regretting nitpicking' is a grammar claim? It was true
when I wrote it and doubly so now.

Are you saying that when I wrote 'you could say' that I was making an
assertion? "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a
thought without accepting it," and all that. If everything is black and white
to you then I'm not much interested in continuing this conversation.

Are you saying that my reference to this as a grammar issue and not one of
style is a claim? If so, I suggest you head over to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less)
and correct all the text and metadata that mentions 'grammar' in the context
of that argument.

~~~
dmm
> I really really don't want to grammar-nitpick

> I haven't made a single grammar claim.

I interpreted you using the word 'grammar' to mean that you were making a
grammatical claim. And I was thinking of grammar as binary thing, either right
or wrong. I thought of grammar as a set of rules that would determine whether
a statement was well-formed.

You include in the idea of grammar not only correctness but also judgements
like: "less bugs" sounds bad to me and probably isn't appropriate for
professional communications. In my mind at the time that sort of statement
wouldn't have been a matter of grammar. Maybe spending all day with formal
languages and programming gave me that idea.

I don't know how to communicate with you. It's hard to do sometimes with just
the written word. Sorry for wasting your time.

------
JDDunn9
Wish there was a better sales page explaining what it does instead of having
to download a trial. Importing/parsing a .csv file isn't hard in Python. What
else does it do?

~~~
waterlion
You'd be amazed what people make Excel do with VBA (hint: it doesn't always
have much to do with spreadsheets).

~~~
kybernetyk
I'm playing Eve online. And the spread sheets the community comes up are
simply mind boggling. They access XML API endpoints directly from Excel, etc.

------
bdcravens
from
[https://www.datanitro.com/faq.html#faq-5](https://www.datanitro.com/faq.html#faq-5)

 _We don 't plan to support Mac OS X or Linux._ Drats. So much for my version
of Excel on Linux.

Seriously, OS X seems a pretty glaring oversight. I know I'll get snide
replies about the amount of users, Libre Office, or using Numbers. That misses
the point. I can share an Excel document with a normal bit of VBA and share it
with any Excel user, dating back several years. This product must be installed
on all computers that I'm sharing with, and it totally eliminates OS X users
(as well as Excel 2003 users, which a quick check shows makes up anywhere from
10-20% of users)

This product looks to be a fit for a controlled environment that needs
specific features that VBA simply can't achieve.

~~~
waterlion
I don't know what the current state of Office for Mac is. But the Windows and
Mac versions have an interesting and colourful history. A number of separate
codebases, converging and diverging.

I don't know if this is the best, but it gives an overview:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word)

------
swah
If this is what I imagine, it should/could be making so much money :) Are the
founders HNers?

------
mataug
What does this product do that you can't already do using pywin32 and the COM
API ?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309878)

