
Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet - f292
https://useslate.com/blog/demo/
======
arethuza
Some feedback:

\- Getting the license key was a bit slow, I went through the process of
getting a reminder before the original turned up (I guess I'm impatient - but
it's annoying when I had to hunt around my Junk Mail/Deleted Items to see
where the license had gone). Why bother with a license for a demo?

\- I find the appearance is too different to Excel so is a bit jarring

\- The animations are cute, but not sure that they actually aid usability

\- Although my initial reaction wasn't that positive it did actually grow on
me but I think it needs an obvious immediate impact to demonstrate a clear
benefit over the standard Trace Precedents/Dependents

\- I can actually think of one scenario where this would have been pretty
useful. I was designing a industrial modelling application that had been
"prototyped" as an extremely complex Excel application - I had to spend a
_lot_ of time showing people that the calculations in the spreadsheet weren't
what people thought they were - so having some way of automatically generated
_documentation_ of parts of a spreadsheet would have been useful.

Overall - not bad, but I think you _really_ need to nail the exact pain points
this would be useful for. Maybe also drop the Tony Stark/Avengers example -
it's cute but might not appeal to your target market.

~~~
f292
Thanks for the feedback. The big pain point we are focussing on is when you
are given someone else's spreadsheet that you are not familiar with. It then
can take hours to get your head around how they have put it together.

In this regard, Slate is most useful as way of semi-automatically documenting
the spreadsheet.

We made the Iron Man example specifically for HN - possibly not the best thing
to pitch big financial firms with - fair point!

~~~
arethuza
"It then can take hours"

I've spent weeks trying to understand a large spreadsheet. Mind you, a lot of
that was persuading people that I was correct when I said what it was actually
doing was at odds with what they though it should have been doing!

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excel2flow
I had some trouble reading nested IF functions, so I wrote a piece of code
which translates them into flowcharts:
[http://excel2flow.asp2.cz/](http://excel2flow.asp2.cz/) (weekend project)

~~~
Fragment
Far more useful than the OP, IMO. Awesome!

It briefly bugged out (dumping everything as a string into a single result
block) on entering a ":" or ";" after the word "Error" in a string as part of
the long formula I tested it with, but since then I've changed a few minor
things and it's stopped happening :S

~~~
excel2flow
Thanks for testing! ";" is delimiter for function arguments in czech version
of Excel (because "," is decimal delimiter). Parser tries to guess if you're
using czech or english version and it probably guessed wrong.

Anyway, I wrote the parser by hand so I cannot guarantee it will work on every
valid Excel formula. But I'm working on improved version which will use formal
grammar.

------
roel_v
OK here is my feedback.

First some superficial stuff: Installshield is not going to fly with the
market you want to make real money off, i.e. big organisations who want to
deploy through Active Directory. The Office addin installer can be put as a
merge module into an MSI, that will make the overall install experience much
slicker. The instructions on the web page that opens after installation say to
look in tab 'Add ins', but it's in separate 'Slate' tab (Office 2013/Win8.1).
The introduction tutorial is unintelligibly small on a high dpi screen (Lenovo
Yoga Pro 2); so is everything else that doesn't scale with ctrl-mousewheel. I
just aimed very well with the mouse to make it go away and I tried to figure
it out on my own.

On to the functionality. I work with Excel models if not daily, then at least
a few times a week. These are usually either models I get from partners and
which I integrate with other models, or they are data analyses. Over the last
few weeks I worked with an economic model and a demographic model I got from
outside, and I did several analyses on land use/population data myself.
They're always intricate and on the overall complexity scale (as far as Excel
models go) range from 'medium' to 'high'. So I think I'm exactly your target
customer.

I tried first with a medium-complexity spreadsheet (5 worksheets, couple of
dozen 'variables' where the variables are usually 2d matrices and the analysis
is in aggregating and disaggregating the input data in various ways). I tried
Slate on several fields, but for none of them I could better understand what
they were than by using Excel's build-in 'Trace precedents' or even by just
reading the formulas. Slate shows only very little context; you have to scroll
out far to see those 2 or 3 steps away, but at that point everything is too
small to read. Furthermore, it doesn't really dissect formulas; for example,
an 'if' with two VLOOKUPs is just a pink blob with a bunch of arrows coming
in, without giving information on how or what. It also takes up half of the
width of my screen, so there isn't a whole lot more I can see on the screen.

What is worse is that there is no description of each 'block' (could have
taken the label in front or above the formulas in the original sheet); nor
does there seem to be a way for me to enter them manually. For example, I can
see the value in being able to annotate a 'box' (variable) in my model with
'Plot counts per district', then an out arrow with 'multiply with average
amount of dwellings in low residential land uses for the transport zone', then
the box where the arrow ends up with 'dwellings in low residential housing
areas per district'. That doesn't seem possible.

When 'show detail' is on, some of the boxes have the upper left corner of some
range of cells in them; I'm not sure how or why. They just seem to take up a
lot of space.

It doesn't look like I can edit anything in the result. For example, I have a
lot of 'if(iserror(formula), 0, formula)'. I don't want to see all of that - I
just want to see 'formula'. The rest is an implementation detail.

When 'hide detail' is on, there doesn't seem to be a way to jump back to the
Excel sheet.

I had a more complex sheet I wanted to try it on after this one, but even this
medium complexity one was harder to understand (and I wrote it over the last
few days, so it's still all in my mind) than the original Excel sheet is; so I
didn't bother with the more complex one.

Sorry to rain on your parade, it must have been a lot of work. I don't see
much added value though in its current form. I'm sure that with much polishing
it can become useful. I think annotations should be first; then abstracting
away implementation details of formulas, you have more ideas yourself
probably. Slate also loses the spatial relation between e.g. columns next to
each other; I'm not sure what to do about that, but it should make up for that
somehow.

Lastly, the price is ridiculous at this stage. At first I though 'oh 50$ seems
OK, then I saw '/month/user'. $50 one-off seems OK; I don't see who will pay
500 a year for this, especially with the basic functionality it has now.

Feel free to email me if you want to know more about the spreadsheet I tested
it on. I'd love to be shown what I should look at that would give me more
insight in my model; I didn't see it myself. A real-world example on your
website (as opposed to an Iron Man made up one, which to be honest is quite
juvenile) would maybe help, too.

Good luck with your product. Please don't be discouraged by this - I'm not
trying to put you down, just honestly telling you what my experiences were, as
you'll get very few reactions from people like me who decide to give up after
10 minutes; while those are exactly the ones you want to hear from to know
what to work on.

~~~
christudor
"So I think I'm exactly your target customer."

From what you've said, I would argue that you're /not/ their target customer.
I used to work with medium- to high-complexity Excel spreadsheets on an almost
daily basis, and while understanding someone else's spreadsheet can be tricky
in the first 3-6 months, after a while you just get used to working out where
data is coming from, usually with the help of F2 (which highlights the cells
which are contributing to the formula).

Which leads me on to the main point: 'Who exactly is the target customer
here?'. If someone uses Excel so much that it makes sense to buy something to
explain formulas, they're probably going to be good enough to make sense of
formulas using Excel's in-built tools/just reading the formula.

~~~
roel_v
Yeah maybe you're right, I just thought that from their price point they
weren't targeting Nancy down the street who needs to decipher the spreadsheet
with the proceeds of the bake sale. I'd consider myself 'entry-level power
user', which I then by elimination thought of as the target market.

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sean_the_geek
IMHO, the concept is novel. Having worked in BI/data analysis fields, I have
seen a fair share of large xls files with complex calculations. Can't really
try now since blocked at work but will definately give it a shot on home pc.

~~~
f292
Great would really like to hear what you think. My email is
fraser@useslate.com if you have any feedback.

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ainla
It's a great idea, but I've been working in multiple enterprise excel hells
and most of the places use macros, because the simple stuff just does not
allow needed complexity.

Now try to visualize that...

~~~
f292
What we have found is that one of the biggest problems in the BI space is the
fact people are not able to code and resort to some of the horrific formulae
we see. But agreed - including macros would add a huge new layer of
complexity!

~~~
rahimnathwani
I much prefer reading Excel spreadsheet with complex formulae, than those with
complex macros. It's much easier to follow things around and literally 'see'
what's going on.

Parentheses FTW!

~~~
robzyb
Absolutely!

Also, the people who write macros are invariably not programmers[1], and the
macro code they write is... not so great.

[1] I am a programmer who writes macros, and presumably there are others too.

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jglauche
Looks nice, sadly it's not only for Excel and I'm on Linux, having only
LibreOffice or Gnumeric.

~~~
throwawayaway
would be interesting to know what installed userbase libreoffice has.
especially compared to excel. i rarely use spreadsheets, so libreoffice calc
is perfect for me.

------
f292
We're the cofounders of Slate. We've just released a stable beta - let us know
what you think!

~~~
babby
The first thing I noticed about your site is how obnoxious the fixed header
is. Please kill it! Not everyone has high vertical pixel density.

~~~
f292
Point taken! Will fix this.

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roel_v
Preliminary bitching while it's downloading: 125mb for an Excel plugin? WTF?

~~~
f292
The add-in is currently bundled with all its dependencies so it will install
quicker once you have downloaded it. Some of the bulkier files include the
Chromium Embedded Framework dlls which we decided to include to get the slick
animations.

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grayclhn
Very minor detail, but numbers should be right aligned "tabular" numbers in
your flowcharts. Digits like to be vertically aligned. I'm on Linux, so I
don't know if that's just an artifact of the example on your homepage or if
it's baked into the plugin too --- but that goes for the default settings in
the plugin too.

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heymishy
seems like a really interesting concept, although I do think you might
struggle getting that into the enterprise (or even medium/large business
space) given the heavy installation. Definitely going to see if it helps with
me requirements of trying to unpick complex financial models built from
spreadsheets.

~~~
f292
Good point. We have had some issues with corporate security, especially in
larger organisations, and are looking at alternatives. Moving to cloud
software could be an option, but big financial firms are even less open to
that that what we are currently building!

~~~
heymishy
Im currently in consultancy for financial services and getting anything either
in as cloud-based SaaS or even a well-established vendor is a nightmare of
risk assessments and red tape. I think this type of tool is very valuable for
a lot of these firms but the ones that need it will be the ones that have
teams of people trying to block you. One answer might be SaaS-based but hosted
on-site to avoid the security issues people have around having their IP in the
cloud. Best of luck!

~~~
f292
We have had a couple of larger firms suggest this as an option they would
prefer, but moving quickly in this direction is the biggest problem though.
Thanks!

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ahtomski
Have you got anyone in finance actually using this at the moment? I imagine
there's a pretty high bar to entry in terms of security/stability for them to
even give a product like this a test drive.

~~~
kfk
Finance here. Just gave it a try, it won’t fly. There are 2 types of finance:
those that take a spreadsheet as it is and just “use” it; those that read
formulas. Neither of the 2 is going to get any value from this. On the other
hand, finance has a lot of drill downs going on (think going from global to
region to country to entity etc.) and I like the way he is displaying data
trees going out of Excel for it.

~~~
f292
We think a lot of the value in Slate will lie in the ability to alter the
level of detail you can see in the model. One of the really exciting ideas we
have is to allow you to group together nodes in a tree to form a "parent node"
representing some higher level functionality (e.g. by geographical region as
you suggest, maybe EMEA forecast for example) . Then there will be the option
to take the general overview of the spreadsheet, or dive down into the
details.

~~~
kfk
Hi, then if you are building this you should put a real database in the middle
and work on hierarchies, structures, mappings, comparisons and drill downs.
You should allow multiple users to pull data from said db into their Excel.
You should do this better than the existing (crappy) solutions like HFM or
BPC. If you do that, I see quite a lot of value for finance-controlling.

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frogpelt
I get:

    
    
        Error reading setup initialization file.

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eddielee6
Fantastic!!

