
Show HN: Turn Excel spreadsheets into APIs - julienmarie
http://calcfusion.com/?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=hnpr
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veb
Please remember that if you're going to have a video on your website to
explain _what_ your site does -- use subtitles/captions!

You'll reach a whole lot more people by doing that. You can even translate the
subtitles. They're also a good way of making a video into meta-data.

Use the Amara project. It's as easy as linking your video, writing a line or
three, and then passing it around until it's done. Then someone else could
come and translate it. Video i18n!

Example using Amara wrapper
[http://pleasecaption.me/example/my_face_is_burning.html](http://pleasecaption.me/example/my_face_is_burning.html)

Then an example using video.js with link to a srt file:
[http://pleasecaption.me/example/](http://pleasecaption.me/example/)

(Amara, [http://www.amara.org](http://www.amara.org))

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hatsix
How does this compare to [http://appsheet.com/](http://appsheet.com/) ?

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julienmarie
Hi. Instead of focusing on trying to make Excel a DB, we focus on the strength
of Excel which is computations and business rules. That's the main difference
:)

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mariocarvalho
Hi. And how does it compare with [http://sheetsu.com](http://sheetsu.com) ?

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julienmarie
Sheetsu is for Google Spreadsheet first, and is data oriented. We are rules
and computation oriented. We do not just read the sheets, we execute them.

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polskibus
Are you parsing xlsx and converting it to your format and data model? Or are
you running excel instances under the hood? What will happen if there's an
odbc connection inside xlsx? Will it be properly executed?

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julienmarie
We run the Excel spreadsheets on our engine. For security purposes, some Excel
features are for the moment disabled ( macros, xll, odbc ). Our take is these
features are to be handled by your code, that send data to the spreadsheets.
The sheet will handle the logic ( business rules, computations ) and send back
the result to your app.

