
Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet - crrashby
https://www.useslate.com/
======
EvanMiller
Thanks for sharing your work. I love your approach to showing relationships
inside a spreadsheet.

This is definitely a feature that Excel ought to have, which is both good news
and bad news for your business. The good news is that you'll probably find
willing buyers. The bad news is if you find too many buyers, Microsoft will
probably implement something similar in their products, which will put your
business at risk.

There are a few ways to survive in these situations. One is to keep moving
with more products and add-ins. That's basically what Xobni had to do, but it
will be exhausting, and I think at some point you'll run out of steam. Another
way is to take out patents and hope for a licensing deal or buy-out from
Microsoft.

A third survival strategy is to have a better product than what Microsoft will
inevitably come out with. It's become cliche at this point, but high product
quality requires, above all, focus. Microsoft might have more money than you,
but if you're willing to focus, you'll actually have more time to think about
the product than they'll have to think about their feature.

To be honest, I were you guys, I'd pick either the Cloud version or the Excel
Add-in and go all in (i.e. dump the other one). Then make that version the
absolute best it can be.

If you're going to focus on one version or the other, there are a lot of
factors to consider, and you guys know the market and technology better than I
do. One factor in favor of the Add-in is that you'll be able to charge a
single purchase price up-front, which will give you more short-term revenues
that will enable you to grow your business without taking (as much) outside
investment. Subscription models are great for big companies and VC-funded
startups, but they're actually a raw deal for cash-starved, self-funded
companies.

Anyway, thanks again for sharing. I look forward to seeing where you take
Slate!

~~~
f292
Thanks for the support and advice! Most of the big financial firms are at
least 2 years away from adopting cloud software, so if we are to target these
as our customer, then it would appear as though the add-in would be the
sensible route.

------
ScottWhigham
Congrats - seems very interesting.

My initial impressions - in an unfiltered, stream-of-conciousness "Ignore if
you like" form:

\- Why would I pay a per month fee for an Excel add-in?

\- The visual examples - the screen width was so wide that I had trouble
grasping how I would use this to see the big picture without zooming out (as
you did)

\- At no point did I understand why I needed to use "the cloud" yet the
pricing implies that I do

\- The Prezi demo took a long time to load

\- The Prezi demo showed me one thing: error handling. That's an edge case
though isn't it? The question is, "Do most people who work with Excel spend
most of their time trying to spot/correct errors in spreadsheets, or do they
spend most of their time trying to understand the data in pristine
spreadsheets?" I'd argue that it's the latter.

\- I have absolutely no idea about how it works with a sample data set. This
is very important to me.

That's just my random feedback. Maybe it's useful to you. it seems like a cool
product.

~~~
f292
Thanks for the feedback. I am one of the co-founders.

To respond to these points: \- Enterprise software seems to be moving
increasingly towards a subscription pricing mode. (eg Office 365).
Additionally, this is software that will be used on a regular (daily, at least
weekly) basis, and when you calculate the potential time-savings, pays for
itself quickly, \- Thanks for the UI tip. We are working really hard on
improving the UI, esp as this is one of our main selling points! \- We need to
be clearer on benefits of cloud vs addin. One of our big learning points
recently has been that users seem to favour the addin over the cloud. \- Sorry
about this. \- From speaking to our target users (mainly analysts in the
financial industry), there are two things that repeatedly come out: error
handling and understanding exactly how complex spreadsheets works. We have
found interest has been about 50:50 for both \- This is a fair point! We will
include some sample data and show the Slate view with it.

------
candybar
Ok just tried the add-in in Excel 2007, some comments:

1) Everything's really slow. Installation's very, very slow and not responsive
and the add-in seems to add considerably to Excel start up time.

2) No ribbon, just three buttons on Add-Ins tab, it looks a bit
unprofessional.

3) It doesn't really work - when I click on "Show sheet" it sends the browser
to some local file slate.html in temp directory, which seems to have just:

Need Help?

+

-

Double click to show full tree again.

There are no formulae on this sheet to display

Contact support@slateforexcel.com for support queries or feedback.

Loading...

Where's the stuff I saw in the video? Was that Mac-only?

4) I'd look into using Excel-DNA/NetOffice instead of VSTO, which requires a
runtime. That makes it easier for business units to subscribe directly without
going through the IT and the whole procurement process, etc.

~~~
f292
Thanks a lot for the feedback.

At the moment, we are using the browser to render Slate view so that we could
use available web technologies to draw the tree.

Good point about Excel-DNA: we will take a look at this.

We have had some compatibility issues with Excel 2007. Perhaps we could take
this to email? I am fraser@useslate.com

------
candybar
This is great work, but I think for most heavy, advanced Excel users, the
visualization is much harder to understand and navigate than the actual
spreadsheet. And that's for fairly simple examples you have in videos and
demos - real world finance models are orders of magnitude more complex and
this visualization will have to go on for pages, entirely out of the visual
context in which cells are placed.

Trying to visualize an entire sheet is fairly silly as a paradigm, because the
only sheets that are easy to visualize this way are too simple for this to be
useful. And Excel is a heavily visual environment already, where the
visualization is controlled by the user. Context-sensitive visualization that
fits within the workflow would seem to be much better. As it stands, this is
optimized for technical people who don't really use Excel enough to be good at
it, yet have to debug simple workbooks authored by others. I don't think
that's a big enough market.

------
th3iedkid
Really cool.I've been working on semantic models for sometime. At my work we
do loads of spreadsheets+docs+ other things which are supposed to communicate
ideas.But unfortunately it never seems to communicate the ideas as is.Take an
example.I were to a market to buy some vegetables.As soon as the shop keeper
says '1 Kg is Rs 20', it immediately communicates how much i'll need to
pay.Its because we all share the common formal semantic for maths we get to
ship ideas easily.But not so in financial software(where i work).Ideas take
spreadsheets+word-docs+experts to have a call on!Can't it be simpler?Like the
visual realization of the spread sheet example shows it can be simpler!

------
pgt
I wonder if this type of visualisation could be used to understand non-trivial
functional programs that aren't Excel. Reminds me of Subtext:
[http://www.subtext-lang.org/](http://www.subtext-lang.org/)

------
viggity
I (being a developer) really like the concept, but I'm curious what they've
done to verify the market.

It's my impression that the kind of people that need to resort to using
spreadsheets as a highly abstracted programming language are (mostly) mutually
exclusive with the kinds of people that would want/need this deep grain
analysis. But I'm just some dude. The more I think about it, I could imagine
some non-quant in the financial services industry may be interested in
something like this.

~~~
f292
We are former oil and gas analysts and found that interpreting and
understanding spreadsheets is an incredibly time consuming task. We have
spoken to dozens of financial analysts (whom we have discovered are our
primary user) and have found out that the problem is amplified by an order of
magnitude for them! They spend literally hours deciphering complexity in
spreadsheets. FYI, we are mainly targeting those who are in Excel for more
than 70% of the working day and developing models (normally financial or
market sizing ones).

~~~
thanatropism
> normally financial or market sizing ones

A-ha. Here's the hidden assumption. You're looking at sheets that have a
handful of parameters/assumptions and span out their consequences. (You want
to stake out the market of people selling Monte Carlo add-ins.)

Many people use spreadsheets as ad hoc accretion
calculators/graphers/explorers. This very week -- I estimated about a hundred
separate generalized-extreme-value models in Mathematica (working basically by
hand to import data from Excel; but this because there was a lot of careful
culling), then exported a number of statistics from the distributions. Then I
spent a couple of hours a day later looking at scatterplots in Excel -- trying
transformations, whatever worked -- that helped me show how those models
isolated a particular global feature across the hundred-or-so distributions.

I was looking at your demo and shaking my head -- "is this for cash flow
models? But it doesn't even have features for stochastic parameters..." But I
guess I see it.

------
buckbova
Looks like you changed your domain name. Probably best to shed that "excel"
name.

[http://slateforexcel.com](http://slateforexcel.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585889)

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

~~~
shubb
This is cool, I'll be sharing it with a bunch of people. But you might want to
share the demo link
[https://www.useslate.com/use](https://www.useslate.com/use) so that people
instantly try it out. Not so much explanation on that page to make them bite
though.

------
ahtomski
I'm curious, how have you built this?

~~~
f292
For the cloud version, we are mainly using C#, Python + JavaScript; and
generate the tree by firstly accessing the internal XML of the spreadsheet
file.

------
notastartup
interested in the technology stack behind this. How do you make an app that
works inside Excel? Is there an add-in or add-on development? What about
supporting older versions of Excel?

~~~
f292
The local version of Slate is a standard C# addin; the cloud version uses most
of the same C# and Python. All of the visualisation is currently done in html,
css + js.

The add-in should work back to Excel 2007.

