
I wandered off and built an IDE - anakic
http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/
======
neonate
Posted seven times before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114421)
(64 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030)
(34 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488)
(111 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991747)
(1 comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022)
(64 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359128)
(10 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9399119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9399119)
(6 comments)

~~~
extrememacaroni
Looks like this attempt is the winner!

~~~
anakic
Absolutely!:) I didn't expect this at all. I had to write 5 articles as part
of my last milestone for HugeThing (accelerator) and share them somewhere. I
wrote four technical ones in a day and a half. I then struggled with this one
for three days. Had no idea where I'd share it or if I was going to use it at
all. Finished it up this morning, and figured what the heck, I'll post it on
HN. Probably no one's going to read it. Holy moly, was I wrong. Immediately
posted on Reddit too, where it went through the roof.

~~~
mygo
Doesnt it feel good to post about what interests you, on your own terms,
without a care for if anyone even cares, and then it blows up?

~~~
anakic
Yes sir, it certainly does.

------
xyproto
@anakic

That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer,
tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features
instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper
job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post.

I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer
science, and the bottom line is that to make money you should first try to
find someone willing to hand you their money, and then put the effort into
making the product or service. But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and
just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even
been made. But I've seen it work many times, you just need sales people that
are not afraid of making up products while they go, with both the profit and
stress that follows.

I'm glad you found a good opportunity with an accelerator, good luck with the
next adventure!

~~~
dhimes
_But, as a developer, it 's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell
something before something proper has even been made._

This has been my biggest struggle.

~~~
corry
In my experience, technical people latently believe the thing that people buy
from you is a product. So if the product isn't done / ready / etc, then you
are being misleading trying to "sell" them or engage with them. It feels
wrong, like you're forced to misrepresent yourself.

You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will
expect everything to be perfect.

But what if the above isn't true at all? What if the potential buyer is buying
something more abstract? Like a solution to a problem; or even the _chance at
future resolution_ of a painful problem?

And what if they aren't power users? But just need basic help today that could
grow into something better tomorrow?

Like, what if they just need a partner to help them solve a painful part of
their work, and would be willing to put up with a lot of incomplete stuff to
get that?

In that case, reaching out to them to "sell" them in the early days is
basically saying "Hey, I'm starting to build XYZ that solves problem ABC. My
goal is that it would help by doing DEF. Do you have that problem? I'm early
on in the process, and looking for lots of feedback from potential users.
Would you be interested in checking out my prototype / designs / thinking on
this?"

That doesn't seem "soul-wrenching" or disingenuous or anything like that. It
feels very authentic. You're making yourself somewhat vulnerable and
portraying yourself as eager to learn and help.

IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that
non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then
working with those early users to build something useful.

~~~
e1g
This shift in perspective has been critical for me. Similarly, it is critical
to ask “Whose problem am I solving?”

I am an engineer and tinkering with tech brings me pleasure from creating, I
crave mental stimulation, and I get immense satisfaction from havingright
things in right places”. Polishing the code is like polishing the car engine
for a petrolhead.

But those are my problems and triggers. I am feeding _my_ needs, then
implicitly expect other people to give me _their_ money for doing this.
Because look how hard I toiled! Yet many people do not care how polished their
car engine is. And I have never seen clean code that was generating revenue.

The critical shift was to accept that people and have needs I don’t have, and
they are desperate to solve them. And their professional lives are often
painful - I get frustrated when I spend a day with almost any professional
outside of tech. “ _This_ is the shit you have to put up with to get anything
done??!” I haven’t had that problem since teens, if ever, and I can fix it.
Automatically, empathy takes over, and I want to rescue them from the daily
dread. So I wire together a minimal app that will make them glow with delight
for 6 months, and they’ll give me dollars in return. Today was a good day,
because two strangers supported each other and did not focus entirely on
themselves.

If it were up to me, everyone would get a juicy steak. But when going fishing
it’s more effective to bring worms.

~~~
astro_robot
That really is some great insight into entrepreneurship. I have that same
problem of wanting everything to be perfect before showing it to anyone.

------
jason_slack
“You might be surprised to learn that in a developer’s life, there aren’t all
that many chances to impress girls with your coding skills.”

Ha ha. When my wife and I were new she asked to use my laptop and was
surprised that it “had no icons”. (No window system). So I started to show her
how to avoid using a GUI. 12 years later she uses a terminal about half of her
time as a stock administrator.

~~~
Double_a_92
Textbased internet surfing must be awesome.

~~~
jason_slack
You would be quite surprised actually. Try it and see how often you decide to
use it over a graphical browser.

~~~
noam87
What do you use? -- I've tried with lynx and its ilk but I find that too many
websites these days are completely broken without javascript, and the layout
often unreadable without CSS.

~~~
jason_slack
Lynx, plus I have made my own enhancements over the years for the way I like
to browse.

------
shimon
FYI, Google Sheets has limited SQL support via their =QUERY() function:

[https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en)

This has come in handy for me recently, but it's painful to try and edit even
a simple SQL query in the cell edit field. However, it's super convenient to
have this capability built into the spreadsheet.

Marketing idea for QueryStorm: guides that apply your tool for specific data
analysis/workflow challenges. You might benefit from looking for the popular
guides for Google Sheets that rely heavily on QUERY(). Then you can translate
those for Excel/QueryStorm and suddenly you've got answers for "How to do XYZ
in Excel" that promote your tool.

~~~
RussianCow
This is a fantastic idea. Several years ago I worked for a startup that sold a
series of very niche services, and this technique produced probably about 80%
of our web traffic.

------
kelvin0
I really like this guy's tenacity and clever use of excel. But from my
experience you can use excel files as an ODBC database source (Windows).

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-
as-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-an-odbc-
database)

Once you create your ODBC source from the excel files, you can run queries and
use the language of your choice (Python,C# ....). I am pretty sure you can
also insert/update rows and columns too.

Wondering how this differs from the approach I describe (which has existed for
many years).

Good work!

~~~
the-dude
See the Dropbox HN argument.

Polish.

~~~
thisisandyok
Infamous Dropbox comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

~~~
zerr
To be honest - dropbox is still burning investors money, right? AFAIK they are
not profitable even today.

~~~
drgath
They’re about to IPO. Doesn’t mean they’re profitable, but it does mean their
finances are healthy enough that they can be publicly traded.

~~~
TomV1971
They already IPO’d. :-)

------
EnderMB
That was a fantastic read. In a world of products and apps that seem to be a
solution looking for a problem, it's nice to see a full story illustrating a
common problem, and how a technical person came to provide a featured solution
to that problem.

I think I already know the answer to this, but I assume that this IDE is
Windows only? I couldn't see any information about platforms on the main
product page, which might throw someone off if they use Excel on a Mac.

~~~
anakic
Glad you enjoyed it!

I think I know what you assume and I assume you assume correctly. Windows only
so far, Excel for Mac doesn't have VSTO:(

~~~
btown
There is [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-
ins/excel/ex...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-
ins/excel/excel-add-ins-overview) if you wanted to port it to JavaScript! It’s
a very weird and badly documented async API, but it is possible to lift out
the data and, say, use
[https://github.com/kripken/sql.js](https://github.com/kripken/sql.js) . If
you’ve got something good going in VSTO though, I wouldn’t waste time trying
to port it. Most people doing corporate reporting are indeed doing it on
Windows anyways, I’d imagine.

------
laurentl
My usual approach when I reach the limit of my excel skills (and patience) is
to save as csv, write a Python script to do the job, import back in excel for
the graphs. This looks like it could nicely streamline the process, granted I
learn a bit of C# (any excuse to pick up a new language I guess). Looking
forward to try the tool the next time I battle a budget forecasting file. And
kudos for the well-written and funny article.

~~~
onychomys
If you're already exporting to CSV, why bring it back in for the graphing?
There are plenty of decent python graphing libraries. Or if you hated all of
those, you could always just use R, which will make basically any graph you
could ever need (...and do the data analysis for you too).

~~~
laurentl
Because excel files are the lingua Franca of the corporate world. Much easier
to share an excel file with the numbers formatted to HR/finance/management
expectations and a few graphs (which they can modify to their liking if
necessary), than a word file with embedded graphics and tables (which they
can’t change so they’ll ask you to redo the graphs in puce or whatever). Or
god forbid a jupyter notebook... FWIW I worked once with a network graphing
tool for a fairly involved HR topic (mapping out all possible career paths
within an engineering department) and I spent half my time learning the tool,
and the other half exporting images and importing them in PowerPoint.

------
rattray
I thought this sounded pretty cool:

> It doesn't copy the data into it, it actually lets the SQLite engine use
> Excel tables as the data storage (I implemented something SQLite calls a
> virtual table - an adapter to let it work with custom data sources). This
> means you can run update/delete/insert statements directly on excel tables

(from the linked reddit post, I haven't finished the blog post)

I wonder if a similar sort of approach with FDW's could work with Postgres and
Excel.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Yep, that's just what FDWs are for-- modular storage layer. Plenty of cool
hacks :)

------
ratsimihah
I like your humour, I like the joke about the mansion, I like how you casually
assume that choosing the project over Anna was obvious as you move on. Nice
article!

You should do an interview with IndieHackers!

~~~
anakic
I like the way you list things you like. Never heard of IndieHackers, but I'd
love to be interview by them if they'll have me. I'll check em out. Cheers for
the tip and the kind words.

~~~
ratsimihah
Haha :) Here you go
[https://www.indiehackers.com/contribute](https://www.indiehackers.com/contribute)

They used to be a lot more focused on interviews, but then Stripe bought them
and they somewhat shifted focus a little, but the interviews are still there.

I guess the "right" thing to do now would be to add your product there?
[https://www.indiehackers.com/products](https://www.indiehackers.com/products)

Either way, it should give you additional great exposure from a community you
seem to belong to.

------
gigatexal
I hope Microsoft gives you a ton of money and hires you to make Excel like
this. VBA is so crap. And this looks amazing.

~~~
xeonoex
I hope so too. I've used QueryStorm for a year or so. I try to avoid Excel as
much as possible, but when I have to use it, I can spend 4 hour learning the
Excel/VBA way to do something, or 1 minute and write it in SQL. It doesn't
make sense how this isn't in Excel already.

Seriously. Try to do a join and some simple data manipulation/aggregation in
Excel without this. Or try to emulate SQL minus/except. You'll Google for
simple answers using the UI, and those probably don't even solve your exact
problem, then dig until you find some that seem correct, try to implement
them, and then realizes it doesn't work for some unknown reason. Then either
give in and write VBA to do it (which also sucks), or pull it out of Excel and
put in something that uses a good language.

~~~
anakic
Thanks for writing this!

------
gormz
lmao, I really appreciate the story telling here. Nearly started laughing at
my desk when you switched to "ex-girlfriend" after the ultimatum.

~~~
m_mueller
There‘s obviously much more going on but just from reading OPs article I got
angry at his ex-GF. Be a little supportive, geez...

------
faitswulff
This was hilarious and utterly relatable. I've also built a lot of one-off
tools for my pharmacist girlfriend (now wife - she learned SQL with me ;)

Congrats on the launch and the joining accelerator, hope it gains traction! It
looks fantastic!

~~~
ratsimihah
You did better than the OP relationship-wise xD

------
nolok
I have to say, without even looking at the actual product, seeing it use the
FooStorm naming from jetbrains while being a paid product isn't inspiring much
confidence.

~~~
anakic
Yeah, I do get that comment every now and then. It was originally called
ThingieQuery, but then I got people saying that they liked it but couldn't ask
a manager to buy something called ThingieQuery. I didn't consciously steal the
JetBrains naming, but the first time someone pointed it out my reaction was
d'oh...

~~~
sbarre
What about "ExcQL" ?

~~~
whoisthemachine
Or, since the original motivation came from his (presumably) ex-girlfriend,
perhaps just "ExQL"?

~~~
anakic
Love it, haha <3

------
tclancy
This was a terrific read and it might just save my former girlfriend (and
current wife) a ton of time at work each month!

~~~
anakic
Thanks and I hope you use of it, that would be fantastic! Let me know if you
need any help, there's a contact email on the website. There's a sales and
support address, but feel free to pick any one, they all go to me:)

------
michaelmcmillan
"It took a few days to build the first version. It was butt-ugly and looked
like it was designed according to whatever the opposite to Feng Shui is, but
it worked nicely."

Made me laugh.

------
kanwisher
Your blog post should probably show a picture of the product

~~~
anakic
I felt like I should keep it about the story, but yeah, maybe a picture or two
would be nice. I'll see about including a gif at the beginning.

~~~
hitekker
Fast turnaround. That gif made a newcomer like me immediately appreciate your
work.

------
escanda
I read the post and it's amazing you took the hard path. In regard to the
product, first of all kudos, and second of all; you may want your users to be
able to run analytical workflows. In which case embedding Firebird instead of
SQLite might be cool. Just something I thought while reading the docs.

~~~
anakic
I've never used Firebird db so far. I have no idea how it differs. I will
check it out, and possibly include it. QueryStorm already supports 6-7
different types of databases so one more won't be too difficult to add. Thanks
for the tip!

~~~
escanda
Is it possible to run Window queries on SQLite? I think it's not! Firebird
implements quite a few of these statements.

I integrated most commercial db vendors and we even ran queries on imported
data in a HSQLDB database. Firebird is just way ahead of HSQLDB, and HSQLDB is
similar to SQLite feature-wise.

I don't mean it would be cool to be able to export to Firebird. I mean that
you might want to use Firebird as your underlying engine :)

~~~
nl
What's a "Window queries"?

------
ramkarthikk
Interesting read about an equally interesting product (plugin). I can
definitely see how it can help so many people.

Quick suggestion: If at any point you are looking to offer varying price
points based on features, one possibility is to have three versions - Business
(for people who know and work mostly on Excel every day), Developer (C#, LINQ
etc.) , Complete (All features).

Because having worked with many people who work with Excel for whole day, at
least 90% of the users will not understand or use this: "Additionally, imagine
how much easier it would be to build prototypes and small applications if
instead of VBA you could use C# (and LINQ) in Excel. You could write business
logic in C#, load data from all sorts of APIs."

Not to say this will not be useful. This will be extremely useful for me (a
developer). Just a thought.

Good luck with QueryStorm.

------
JackFr
My girlfriend married me for showing her Ctrl-Z.

~~~
latexr
A former girlfriend asked me to marry her after I showed her ⌘⇧T in Firefox.

------
clarkeni
@anakic

I have used excel as a data source using VBA before so one problem I had there
that I'm curious how you approached was how to automatically determine data
types? IIRC the ODBC engine in VBA scans a set amount of rows to guess. Are
you doing anything different?

~~~
anakic
Hey! I scan the entire contents of the table. I have a cache layer in memory
anyway so that works quickly. If you have multiple types in the same column,
it just treats the type as "object". If you connect, and start entering
various types into your columns, you'll notice in the object explorer that it
updates the type information.

------
rufusroflpunch
Nice. That's further than I would have gone. I would have written a script to
export to CSV, import to SQLite, run the queries, export back to CSV then
convert back to Excel. Maybe that's why I don't have my own company...

~~~
ReverseCold
Excel can import/export CSVs already, so the only thing you'd need to do
(assuming you already have Excel open) is hit save and then open it in/as
SQLite. A script could possibly make it more difficult :)

------
lakechfoma
This makes me wish I had to do more grunt work in Excel.

------
adamcharnock
I thoroughly enjoyed read this, thanks for posting. Well done on making
something for which there is an actual need and polishing it enough to charge
money for. That isn’t easy in my experience.

------
ninjamayo
Hey I am so glad this is working. I talked with you via reddit when you first
started working on the project. It looks like it has grown dramatically over
the years.

Well done!

~~~
anakic
Hey, I remember, same username and all!:) Thanks for saying hi, man!:)

~~~
ninjamayo
No problem. I think you did a great job persisting with your project!

------
nickpsecurity
Great writing. Cool project. What it sounds like is there's going to be piles
of use-cases in different companies for something like this that are all
different. I suggest a model of selling companies custom solutions to those
that all leverage your plug-in or tech. You might license the underlying tech
itself, too. So, the start could be something like:

1\. Surveys on places with lots of Excel users worded to figure out what jobs
they have that take lots of manual steps with days of effort. This is your
potential market.

2\. Maybe immediately create proposals for the ones you could handle easily as
a one-man shop. That's some revenue to get you started.

3\. Look for any common patterns in them you can abstract into generic
functions or generators. This becomes part of your tooling.

4\. Also, look for any kinds of analysis that happen pretty often in certain
industries. Then, you might create some basic functionality to as industry-
specific solutions that your customization work builds on. If not that, it
could just be a marketing tool illustrating the value your software provides
to that segment.

Those are the ideas that came to mind as I read your article. Good luck.

------
rattray
There were many components mentioned here that sound like they would be
marvelously useful to the open-source community without being too competitive
(eg; various SQLite parsing tooling, SQLite/Excel interface, SQLite/other db
interface, etc).

Might be worth open-sourcing? Perhaps even under a restrictive license (free
for FOSS work, otherwise paid).

~~~
TAForObvReasons
There's been quite a bit of open source work in this space.
[https://github.com/dinedal/textql](https://github.com/dinedal/textql) runs
queries against CSVs on the command line.
[http://sheetjs.com/sexql/](http://sheetjs.com/sexql/) runs queries against
excel files in the web browser.

------
Quarrelsome
We have a bunch of people that have to build and maintain VBA excel files for
our clients. We'd really rather not maintain all this VBA crap. Can we replace
that with this? Can it deploy files with all those horrible rules or is it
more primitive than that and only functions as an IDE for personal Excel
munging?

~~~
anakic
Hey! Absolutely you can! You can embed code into the workbook and automate
stuff. If you're up for it, I'd love to discuss over Skype. It's the perfect
use case! Send me an email, it's antonio at querystorm dot com.

------
Insanity
Congratulations on the project. It actually seems like something quite fun to
build! I'd probably have kept it open source and just do it for fun, but good
luck with the company nontheless!

Personally I did not immediatly think about Jetbrains when reading this name,
probably because I mostly use IntelliJ IDEA rather than PHPStorm.

~~~
anakic
Yeah, it was really fun to built! The parser, editor features and C# support
were amazing to work on. Some times I felt like I was wasting time, but when I
compare what I was working on most days in a corp to what I get to work on
with QueryStorm, I'm pretty happy I did what I did. As for open source, that
might be a better way to go. The project needs a community and open sourcing
would help a lot. It's something for me to consider.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Did you use Roslyn for the C# support?

~~~
softawre
He did, it is in the article.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ouch, my mistake. I didn't read closely enough. I'm sure the Roslyn folks
would be happy about this.

------
pkamb
I love the pricing, $150/year.

Where are the other professional developer tools with subscription pricing?
Not stuff company stuff like Atlasssian or web-SaaS, but, say, a really good
local `git` GUI and merge tool.

------
mrleiter
In regards to your non-existent pricing page, I would suggest this read:
[https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-
pricing](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing) :) I think you could
capture more B2B value if you display some amount of pricing for potential
business customers and also make it more clear for non-commercial users that
it is free.

Besides from that, product looks really nice!

~~~
tclancy
Seconding this. Without upfront pricing, I always assume buying a copy means
handing over my email or phone to The Sales Team.

------
SnowingXIV
What a pleasant read. Not bad a way to start a Friday. Thanks for sharing. As
someone who battles between having to use SQL and Excel quite often this is
pretty neat.

------
mwexler
Trial purchase page seems to be only place you describe the difference between
free and Professional
([https://www.querystorm.com/trial.html](https://www.querystorm.com/trial.html)).
Perhaps add to FAQ in docs or elsewhere to make clear the added functionality
that comes from purchase, beyond the "non-commercial vs. commercial" use
license requirement.

Otherwise, cool system!

------
fartcannon
Well done.

I think LibreOffice offers a python/javascript scripts/plugins? Anyone want to
get an ultimatum from their girlfriend and build one for Linux?

------
pknerd
Your story/writing is more amazing for me than IDE itself. Awesome man and
sorry for your breakup.... Didn't feel good about it.

------
caseymarquis
It would be helpful to have a link to pricing accessible on the front page of
the site. Not seeing this on mobile at least. Businesses aren't afraid to
spend $100/yr or $10/month for a useful tool. It cost more to have a meeting
than to impulse buy. Not seeing pricing info on the site is kind of a turn
off. Maybe that's just me?

~~~
caseymarquis
I hopped on to my PC to actually try the plugin. It's because the buy button
and the rest of the top menu are removed when screen width gets small enough.

------
rattray
Someone on this thread mentioned EasyMorph, a visual (low-code) tool for
excel/db/etc data munging. I can't find that comment now but I thought it
looked interesting.

Resubmitted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773686)

------
sporkenfang
Kudos on the IDE, kudos on helping your girlfriend, but it could have done
without the "I'll solve all the problems with technology and then she'll see
me as the hero I am" schtick. It made it kind of an uncomfortable read, even
though you did clearly build something with a use case, which is always
admirable.

~~~
anakic
That was auto-ironic, though:) I think that's the right phrase...

------
TheRealDunkirk
Awesome. Get people to make even more convoluted messes in Excel for me to
detangle and make into a web application.

------
HeavyStorm
Maybe of note: I've always dreamed of building stuff in excel with c#. And I
craved something that let me use linq inside excel.

I'm a consultant working for corporations and excel is part of my life. Your
plug-in has a market. In fact, I'll advertise it inside my company - if I like
it, of course.

------
l9k
There's no Install button when the (desktop) browser window is too small
except at the end of the page in the footer.

Even if hiding it for mobile seems like a good idea (not the target), someone
looking at the website on mobile would acknowledge they can easily download
the software later on.

------
gnomespaceship
Fortunately, I don't use Excel at work, but this was a very entertaining read.
Thanks @anakic!

~~~
anakic
Thanks! I touch on the project a little, but the point was to stick to the
story and make it enjoyable to read. I'm glad it worked:)

------
mistermann
How hard would it be to add support for calling Python scripts, so an advanced
person could use one of the many internet articles on Pandas
scraping/etl/mashups to pre-process some data before bringing in as an excel
table?

------
erdemozg
Thank you for sharing this with us.

Have you considered turning this into a web based SaaS product? (upload excel
-> do fancy stuff -> export or save the result on cloud)

Is there any specific reason for the current licensing/revenue model?

~~~
anakic
No plans for the cloud solution so far. I figured it needs a community, so a
lot of it has to be free for non commercial use. For commercial use I figured
the price isn't going to be an issue. Probably there's more tweaking to do
there. I'd love to get some thoughts on it.

------
allisterb
This is pretty awesome. Love the multi-pane interface. It's true there is a
lot of data access tech for Excel data like OLE DB, but this works right
inside Excel which has a huge user base. Good luck!

------
billconan
I also had to help my ex-girlfriend (preschool director) make google drive
scripts to generate tables. I found small businesses have great need for this
type of things. I explored this as a startup idea.

~~~
fiatjaf
And was it successful?

~~~
billconan
No I have never done it, I just thought there is a great need for it. The
reason is because I can't formalize my idea. I want to make this thing useful
and simple at the same time, but it's hard.

google drive script, for example, is still too complex to use for non-tech, it
doesn't have a ui builder.

but I can't imagine a simpler, drag-and-drop solution that can implement
complex data processing logic.

------
galen211
This is great - I refuse to mess with VBA and I've been doing all my
spreadsheet regex work using R/RStudio until now. The regex feature alone
could save me tons of hours in my consulting job.

~~~
anakic
Fantastic! If you're up for it, I'd love to demo and discuss over screen
share. If you'd be interested let me know via email, it's antonio at
querystorm dot com.

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antonkm
I've spent the last month (yes - month) writing a custom CLI to run on CSV for
a customer which have data scattered in a bunch of Excel files. This seem a
bit too good to be true.

~~~
anakic
Only one way to find out:) If you need help setting it up, let me know, I'd be
glad to help if I can

~~~
antonkm
Yes, thank you. I see that my comment might be interpreted as sceptical. It
looks great.

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tda
If I wanted to combine Excel and SQL, I would look at MS Access first. How
does this compare? Also with the latest powerquery add ons Excel you can
actually do joins in Excel itself

~~~
anakic
Sure. With Access you'd have to first get the data into it, process it there
and get it back. With QueryStorm, you just click "connect" and you get a nice
SQL editor, code completion and all. Anything that's marked as a table will
show up as a database table. If you wanna connect to access or some other type
of database you can do that as well, and the Excel tables will be visible to
the database as temp tables.

As for PowerQuery, it's designed as an ETL tool to get data into the tabular
model and process it, but isn't as expressive or as well known as SQL. It's a
bit less technical, I guess. It's useful, but if you know both SQL and
PowerQuery you can probably do much more with SQL.

------
sairap
Hi - the tool looks great. Is there an e-mail address I can reach you at?
Wanted to bring something to your attension, in private. Dont worry - I'm not
selling anything :)

------
SomeHacker44
> You might be surprised to learn that in a developer’s life, there aren’t all
> that many chances to impress girls with your coding skills.

Truth!

I am at zero for 35+ years so far...

------
dalacv
I just took a look at QueryStorm. Very cool indeed.

------
tommy2big
Hmmm. Excel has supported SQL queries against itself for at least 20 years.
This includes select, insert, update, delete

~~~
willhslade
Via MS Query? ADO? OLAP cubes? Care to elaborate for the newbs?

~~~
tommy2big
Yes, MSQuery. Here is the first of many results returned by Google after
searching "query Excel spreadsheet" (I didn't bother reading it)
[http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/msquery-excel-
relational-d...](http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/msquery-excel-relational-
data.htm)

------
totololo
"As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to
impress a girl" Gotta love the man :)

------
fomoz
Cool IDE, cool project.

At the same time, it can all be done in Power Pivot and Power Query as long as
you know how to use them.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
You can use C# and SQL in Power Pivot and Power Query? I couldn't figure out
how to do so based on a cursory web search.

More generally, you can do all of this same 'stuff' in any language. This
seems like a possibly _better_ way to do the same things tho.

~~~
fomoz
If you need to use C# in Excel, you're doing it wrong. There's very little
programming that you should be doing with VBA, too.

Most of your programming should be DAX plus a bit of worksheet functions. Some
SQL to filter your data before loading into Power Pivot.

SQL yes, of course. You run SQL queries to load data into Power Pivot through
a native SQL Server driver or native drivers for your DB or worst case ODBC.

Then you do all the BI analytics in DAX and show results in pivot tables. DAX
is a very fast, concise and very, very powerful language for analytics. This
is the whole purpose of OLAP.

Check out this video when you have time :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WwFJ0Zg3d8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WwFJ0Zg3d8)

------
whoisthemachine
This looks great - nice work. If I get asked to do something complex in Excel
again, I may give this a go :)

------
ultrasounder
This is slick!What a great way to impress your girlfriend.I hope you succeeded
in your mission:-)

~~~
lerpa
If you're referring to the mission of impressing the girlfriend, success
doesn't seem likely.

------
engg
I loved that you used your technical skills to solve a real problem, besides
regular stuff at corporate work :) Insipiring!

Sorry this could be a dumb question, but,does this plugin work with
Spreadsheets in Google docs? If Yes, thats great, just from the perspective
that it will add more customers for you. If not, are you planning to add
support in google sheets as well?

~~~
sleepychu
Not inside Google Sheets, there's nothing stopping you from moving your
spreadsheets to Excell though.

~~~
anakic
Exactly. It just works in Excel, but if you have Excel then it makes
spreadsheets easier and more useful.

------
totololo
"As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to
impress a girl"

:)

------
Serow225
An honest question, isn't this kind of what PowerBI is supposed to do?

------
joepour
“Careful calculations conclusively showed it wasn’t enough for a mansion”

------
emodendroket
The story is kind of goofy, but the product looks very cool indeed.

------
iovrthoughtthis
This looks awesome! Have you thought about joining
[https://wip.chat](https://wip.chat)

Lots of fellow makers in there :)

~~~
Jaruzel
Not the OP but... What's the upside of using wip.chat? It just seems to be a
public to-do list system?

~~~
iovrthoughtthis
A community of people who get things done everyday. Seeing other people mark
off their todos and launch their products all day and night is surprisingly
insupiring.

The community is also very welcoming and helpful!

~~~
Jaruzel
Ah OK, thank you! I couldn't see any actual 'chat' feature - is that because I
wasn't logged in ?

------
tomthehero
Well written. Entertaining. Captivating.

------
profalseidol
Good read. Good Font too. Fast website.

------
prab97
So, what color is your mansion?

Great project by the way!

~~~
anakic
Saving up for a turquoise one:) Thanks!

------
blurkness
Amazing work and story! Congratz!

------
sigzero
Now that's pretty awesome.

------
ataturk
Every place I have ever worked had that same kind of shitty Excel/Access pile
of crap including the manual instructions. It's like people can't understand
that if you can write down a procedure for someone to follow you can automate
that procedure.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Are you a programmer? Have you ever had to support and maintain an 'automated
procedure'?

I'd bet a lot of the people you're casually insulting _do_ understand that it
could be automated, but, unlike you perhaps, they're more cognizant of the
_costs_ of automating it (and ensuring it continues to work).

Processing even slightly messy data can turn out to be a basically unlimited
amount of work, easily.

------
sigi45
I was curious about your ex girlfriend and was hoping that you married here
and that was the reason why she is your ex girlfriend now but apparently not
:(.

------
rotub
I read this as IED (Improvised Explosive Device)... I was disappointed. And
then impressed.

------
synack
Poor Anna

~~~
akuji1993
I hope the ex-girlfriend was either unrelated or a joke, otherwise, i don't
really consider OP a good person.. There's only so much time you should spend
instead of doing something with your loved ones.. I know, I'd probably drop my
project at some point in the evening to get back to my girlfriend or wife.

~~~
xor1
I would be 100% behind my partner in a similar situation, if she were building
something and putting so much time and energy into it. I would love to find
someone like that, actually.

~~~
d6de964
I would love to find someone to love, chemistry is a very hard thing.

------
Bishonen88
working on a daily basis with excel/vba/sql and was intrigued for a moment.
Then I wandered into the pricing and was truly surprised. Again, a niche tool
that charges as much as the complete jetbrains suite (if you're a subscriber
for 3 years).

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Pricing is weird, generally. I understand why you might be "surprised" (that
the price is 'too high'), but it's probably, if anything, _too low_.
(JetBrain's suite is priced too low too!)

I've paid, as just one example, $100 for what's 'basically' just of fancy
keyboard shortcuts for just one of the tools I use frequently. If the benefits
outweigh the costs, then the price is 'just right' (for you).

If you're working with Excel/VBA/SQL daily, then you might already have a nice
'working environment' in terms of the tools and workflow you use. But this
still might be better than what you have now. I know I'd rather use C# and SQL
than VBA or whatever it is you have to use with the similar recent-ish Excel
add-ons.

