
The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel - taylorwc
https://foundationinc.co/lab/the-saas-opportunity-of-unbundling-excel/
======
galfarragem
I don't understand why spreadsheets are so fervourously bashed: most times
they do the job and in a fast and inclusive way.

The spreadsheet is certainly one of the best tools ever invented.

[0] Joel's Spolsky must-watch talk on Excel:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

~~~
brohee
Excel doesn't have a compeling, standard way of doing version control that I
know of, and most Excel files mix freely data and code in the same sheet,
which makes debugging pretty hard. Excel files go from assets to liabilities
when they start boxing over their own weight, which happens pretty fast...

~~~
_bxg1
Makes me wonder if there's a market for an Excel clone whose files are easily
machine- and human-readable, and version-control friendly.

~~~
robbiemitchell
Google Sheets

~~~
bartread
Google Sheets is the main reason I gave up on Google Docs and bought an Office
365 subscription for myself a few years back. It's just nowhere near as good
as Excel. Frankly none of the Google Docs offerings holds a candle to
Microsoft Office[1], so the latter is well worth the money to me.

 _[1] I am tactfully not counting GMail as part of GDocs here because,
honestly, Outlook is the one tool that wouldn 't come off well in that
comparison, and reason #1 is that Outlook's search is terrible; reason #2 is
that Outlook doesn't perform at all well in the face of the modern "I want to
keep all my mail so that I can search for and find relevant messages whenever
I need them", which can be key when dealing with tricksy
customers/partners/co-workers, and is handy even in mundane day to day use._

~~~
rahimnathwani
"Frankly none of the Google Docs offerings holds a candle to Microsoft Office"

Word and Excel are great for individual productivity. If you use documents and
spreadsheets as tools for collaboration, though, Google Docs is much much
better overall, even though it's missing many features to which power users
have become accustomed.

Sure, you can save a file to OneDrive and have multiple people working on it
at the same time. But:

\- In my experience, simultaneous editing via OneDrive (whether using the
browser or the desktop apps) is more laggy and buggy than with Google Docs

\- The commenting functionality is missing lots of features that are essential
to my desired collaboration workflow:

i) Ability to give someone access to add comments and suggest changes, but not
to accept changes or edit directly

ii) Comment authors are identified, and only they can edit comments they have
written

iii) Comments can be received and replied to by email.

The way commenting works in Google Docs encourages collaboration in a way that
the simple comments in Word doesn't. If you've not worked somewhere that uses
Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.

~~~
kjs3
So Google is "much much better overall" for multiple users, as long as you can
dumb what you're working on down enough to fit Docs significant limitations.
That's totally fair, but isn't a trade off everyone can make.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Yes, there's a trade-off. Note, I didn't say Google Docs is better for every
use case. I said it's better "If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools
for collaboration".

The key difference I'm talking about is between:

A. Writing a document, and sending a version of that document to one or more
other people, so that they can do something with it. (This might involve
sending you back feedback or suggestions.)

B. Sharing a link to a 'living' document, with which people can interact in
different ways (comment, participate in comment threads, add change
suggestions, accept/decline changes).

In my experience, B is much harder to achieve, and unlikely to happen
organically, if you use Microsoft Office.

Has anyone here witnessed an organisation that uses Microsoft Office, and
where significant progress is made on people's thinking, through their online
collaboration on docs/sheets?

------
_bxg1
Spreadsheets really are the fullest realization we've seen of functional-
programming-without-code, and with a built-in (rudimentary) database too. It's
no wonder they kicked off the microcomputer era and remain essential to this
day.

~~~
tumetab1
Also the realization of the hardest trick in industry, how to scale :)

Excel works very well for single users with small datasets but if the business
works it breaks in various ways. Sharepoint was the solution to scale excel
but it didn't seem to have been successful as a tool.

~~~
darkpuma
Tons of businesses continue to function with excel without difficulty. Of
course if you're shooting for a SV "unicorn" growth curve you're going to
leave excel in the dust pretty quick, but a great many businesses in a wide
range of industries find excel continues to meet their demands for a lot
longer than you might expect.

~~~
foolfoolz
“you’re going to leave excel in the dust pretty quick”

no. this does not happen. everyone uses excel.

~~~
michaelt
Because of excel's swiss-army-knife powers, it will always be present
somewhere in most organisations, I agree.

But if you start your business with your stock and order tracking in excel,
your customer list in excel, and your accounts in excel, it's not unusual to
outgrow excel in some of those areas fairly quickly.

~~~
darkpuma
Right, Amazon's inventory system certainly can't be run out of a spreadsheet.
But even for something like a very successful restaurant with half a dozen
locations across the state, a few spreadsheets often sit _comfortably_ in the
middle of it all.

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jwr
As the author of a specialized inventory management application (a small
ERP/MRP for electronics production,
[https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)), I definitely agree. Spreadsheet
is my biggest competitor, but also a great opportunity: while you can start
tracking inventory using a spreadsheet, you always eventually outgrow it,
which is my opportunity.

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gk1
Another way of stating this: Many SaaS companies are just CRUD apps for niche
verticals. (That's not a diss at those companies.)

~~~
sct202
A lot of those SaaS end up with end users dumping data down into Excel at some
step, but they definitely can be wins for workflow standardization and error
reduction versus trying to do it all in Excel.

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jweir
Excel is not a competitor to our SaaS - it is an interface. Original our
service was web and email only (energy market financial data). But we quickly
learned our clients want and need that data in CSV so they can build their own
tools. So our API integrates well with Excel.

And that is the power of Excel - a client can build their own solution, backed
by our service. We do the parts that Excel can’t do or do well.

This frees us up from the pressure to build customization for any client - we
won’t do customization only generalization.

We will create new features without any UI - just the API for JSON and CSV.
This lowers our costs and development time - UI can be expensive and time
consuming.

~~~
mmckelvy
This. A spreadsheet is the best UI for most data intensive / business apps.

~~~
glaberficken
This is exactly how we use Excel where I work (a large multinational contact-
center provider). Data is stored in SQL Server and then consumed in Excel in
several ways:

\- Direct query from Excel to SQL Server (This is fast, reliable but users
need to know SQL)

\- Cube pivot or formulas to SQL Server Analysis Services (Lower user skills
needed, but depends on IT/Dev to setup correct measures and processes in
Analysis Services)

\- Using MS Access as an intermediary between Excel and SQL Server (Using MS
Access in the middle is a great way to allow people that don't know SQL to
build some simple joins. Comes at the cost of query performance though.)

\- Using MS Power BI to connect to SQL Server data (this is in its early days
at my company, but is proving to be a great solution for historical reports,
where Excel usually shows its limitations)

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rahimnathwani
I'm surprised neither the article nor any of the HN comments have (so far)
mentioned Airtable.

Airtable seems to have the main advantage of Excel (it can be customised by a
non-technical user) whilst solving some of the limitations (e.g. multi-user,
permissions, workflow triggers).

Someone who would have built their CRM tool in Excel in the past, might well
choose Airtable today.

~~~
i_s
Airtable looks great, but seems incredibly expensive at $10-40 / user. There
are a lot of situations where pricing like this makes no sense, e.g., if you
want every employee to have access to your data, but most of them only check
or enter data once every few months.

~~~
thirdsun
That’s my impression as well. I use Airtable, as well as Notion, personally in
a single user environment and could see countless use cases for our team at
work, but Airtable is simply too expensive and even in its highest tier the
number of allowed records per base seems limited, or “increased” according to
their pricing table.

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abakker
I don't know why nobody mentions this, but if you DO unbundle a feature from
excel, it is exceptionally hard to compete on ubiquity. Excel is cheap, and
even if you replace part of the functionality, nobody will ever actually beat
the price.

Personally, I wish I had an excel-like interface for Python/Pandas. Instead of
sheets, give me modular data frames, and give me a nice GUI for data
import/export/connection.

But, the best feature of excel is that the interpreter is built in. No version
control, no wondering which version of whatever library is installed. If it is
excel, it (mostly) works when I send a file to someone.

Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a
better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual,
one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about
licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant.

~~~
i_s
> Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a
> better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring
> casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible
> about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant.

This is the main reason why I don't use products like Airtable or Notion, even
though they are otherwise very compelling. Charging $10-40 for every user,
even people who may log in once every few months (and maybe don't even change
data) makes no sense. At that price, even excel files on a network drive is
better.

~~~
abakker
FWIW, Airtable has sensible defaults for this. you can share a table for free
(password protected) with non-airtable users. (I do use that for specific team
projects)

------
mmckelvy
I actually think there's an opportunity in the opposite direction: convert
your SaaS apps to spreadsheets.

Instead of having to log into 10 different SaaS apps, you simply make a few
menu selections from within Excel / GSheets and your data is pulled in, ready
to be analyzed.

The spreadsheet becomes the UI, and the SaaS "apps" are basically databases
accessed via an API.

~~~
dpoochieni
Could you elaborate? I'm struggling to come up with examples. Thanks

~~~
dktoao
The company that makes many of the Google Sheets add-ons
([https://www.ghostwrench.net/](https://www.ghostwrench.net/)) that I use at
work has made this their bread and butter. Google Sheets IS the interface to
their software.

------
henning
It is an opportunity, but not an easy one.

Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions,
collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data
source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing,
features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc).

You have to convince customers that what they have going is not actually
working, which requires having a discussion about how just because poor data
management practices have thus far failed to completely destroy your company,
they are wasting tons of time and money. Many of them will have in the back of
their mind that they can always go back to how things were before.

So the behavioral change/change management aspect of a product that really
does directly compete against Excel is very challenging.

~~~
la_barba
It is extremely hard to convince someone they're doing it wrong, when what
they're doing is working for them and is making them money. Its pretty much
ingrained in our human nature, I think.

Instead of telling them their solution blows, its better to gain trust by
first addressing the pain points without any major rework, and then slowly
change the system bit by bit, with each bit providing an instant usable
benefit to the end user.

~~~
henning
You're right, but in practice I don't see how it can be made that simple or
painless.

There is no way to switch from email and Excel to a third-party web
application without major rework.

That's what makes it hard.

~~~
la_barba
I think there are intermediate steps possible in some workflows. For e.g. A
business app that accepts an excel file as input for further processing. So
now you can let them keep the excel file with their existing macros/features,
but give them additional features via this workflow.

------
ComodoHacker
Does the author mixes up "spreadsheet" with "database" or "data entry" or even
"line-of-business app" in general? There's more than spreadsheet in many of
SaaS examples.

~~~
cwyers
If you've never seen a spreadsheet used for all three of those, I envy you.

------
Dwolb
I actually think this article is late and we’re already seeing the next
evolution of this trend: flexible SaaS.

Right now SaaS products are mostly single-purpose workflows and aren’t super
customizable (until the start-up ages and enters a few enterprises who demand
customizations). This is a step-up from Excel which was general purpose but
didn’t facilitate workflows seamlessly.

However what Airtable is finding is almost any specific SaaS can be recreated
with general purpose spreadsheet-like products. Essentially they merged the
ease of use of Excel with additional shared workflows of SaaS.

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elliekelly
How is AirTable not mentioned in this article? If Excel has any major startup
competitor my money is on them. I use spreadsheets constantly and work with a
lot of people who aren’t the savviest when it comes to technology. AirTable
essentially lets them “program” even easier than Excel but also has
sharing/snapshots of changes over time that everyone can see. It’s not quite a
replacement for Excel yet but I absolutely see it heading that direction.

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brianm
FWIW, I have seen (and have recommended) designing a number of applications
with the spreadsheet as their front end. This works particularly well with
google sheets, given its reasonable API. It is way richer than anything you
will quickly build, is designed for mucking with tabular data (and makes it
relatively easy), and it turns out a ton of applications are basically
interfaces on tabular data. Hey hey!

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mrhappyunhappy
Feels like a ton of business could just benefit from automating various
spreadsheet tasks via Zapier. I mean this stuff exists and it’s not rocket
science but people don’t care to figure it out. I think part of it is people
also not wanting to replace themselves out of a job. Does Betty really want to
take that 1 hr daily task and turn it into 5 minute weekly task? I don’t
know... maybe not.

~~~
rightbyte
Ye I agree, but automation breaks down when you need to change and then you
need to commandeer programmers and engineers.

Telling Betty what to do is way more agile than having a task put in the
bottom of some Scrum backlog.

------
subpixel
This is the second front-page post today that is a link to a content marketing
firm's own content marketing.

------
anbop
The problem with SaaS alternatives to Excel business processes is the
difficulty of linking data between apps. Let’s say you want to answer some
topical question, like “are code reviews for women and men written with a
different tone?” You have a HR system that has people’s gender, and a code
review system, and some Google API that measures tone. Good luck stitching
this together between vendors. But dump it to Excel and make the API call from
VBA and it’s easy.

The problem of course is that this becomes an important business metric,
making the spreadsheet a critical business application, but without any of the
tooling used for successful software development (version control, code
review, test automation)

------
matchagaucho
Excel's API are increasingly web service friendly.

How many people prefer Slack native desktop over the web experience?

Excel is the ultimate rich client experience for power users. Maybe we should
brining the web to Excel, rather than the other way around?

------
rmm
My anecdote. I work with mining (resource) companies and am mining engineer
myself.

I reckon one large company coming into our office and spending 2 hours
describing their new software to assist with blast design.

They gave us a trial and while it was slick, it was not much better than our
spreadsheet, that everyone can use and the few extra features they showed we
easily implemented ourselves in the spreadsheet.

Hate to think how much money was spent developing this software that literally
was a pretty GUI over a spreadsheet.

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stefano77it
for those who feel the need to version control of excel sheet content (only
values, not formulas) I published a tool (only VBA code) I wrote to export the
content of every rows of selected sheets (a text file for each row of data,
using a unique id contained in the table as filename).

the gist is here:

[https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def852719...](https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def8527194f39ffb8)

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la_barba
Ironically, I work in a regulated industry and every software we use has to be
compliant with certain government regulations. We would actually love it if we
got to use excel in our business workflow, but we're forced to deal with some
horribly ungodly mess of softwares that cost tens of thousands of dollars,
that do nothing more than have the magic "compliant with X" sticker.

~~~
tabtab
There may be a good reason for it. Excel may be quick to set up, but is not
known for data integrity. You don't want important data being subject to
willy-nilly changes.

Just because I can quickly make a boat with duct-tape and 2x4's doesn't mean
I'm ready for an Atlantic crossing.

~~~
la_barba
Well.. everything starts out with good intention :)

------
seancoleman
After using Airtable for some critical LOB applications, I'm beginning to
think that Excel's biggest competitor is Airtable.

------
wills_forward
‘Every enterprise software startup is an attempt to replace a spreadsheet.’
—wish I remembered who said that originally

~~~
rsimmonds
David Sacks had a great tweet about this concept a while back:

[https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904](https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904)

------
andreyazimov
Nice! Spreadsheets are pretty good CMS as well, so people can use it to create
websites without code.

I made an app called [https://Sheet2Site.com](https://Sheet2Site.com) which
takes your spreadsheet of items/objects and translates it into an app, with
filters.

------
johnrob
Spreadsheets could also be understood as just a fancy pen/paper for a manual
business process. Looking at it this way, the competition isn’t excel but
rather doing things by hand (i.e. a non-solution vs a competitor).

------
tmaly
I could imagine a hybrid approach using Google Forms feeding into Google
sheets then apply a programming layer via the sheets api

------
purplezooey
I mean, Workday? That's a bit of a stretch.

