

Ask HN: What features do you want in a modern spreadsheet app? - codingfounder

Hi HN, I want to build a new spreadsheet app which works on all devices. Excel is great for what it does but it doesn&#x27;t understand the internet and collaboration. Google docs is great for collaboration, but is still a bit clunky and lacks a lot of useful functionality. The Google drive mobile spreadsheet apps have terrible UX.<p>So I want to build a new spreadsheet app that works great on desktop browsers and also on phones and tablets.<p>These are some features I have in mind:<p>1. Hook into all the rich web APIs around us and pull in data from places like Evernote, Twitter, Fitbit, Basecamp, etc straight into a spreadsheet to play with. I can&#x27;t believe we don&#x27;t already have this!<p>2. Reliable format conversion between CSV, JSON, TSV, Excel, Gdocs, etc (as suggested by couple of people in the comments).<p>3. Shortcuts for common data manipulation functions like basic arithmetic, concatenating strings, converting delimited data to columns etc. I&#x27;m imagining simple big buttons for these to make them easy and fast to do on a touch device.<p>Now I want to find out what things HN would find useful to help me prioritise some features for v1.<p>Any ideas and comments welcome. Thanks!
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PeterWhittaker
tl;dr: Use spreadsheet for simple small business accounting, directly, with
ability to export to accounting package (and to gen timesheets and invoices),
out of the box, without me having to grow my own macros, etc.

This may be a very limited use-case, but....

I'm a one-man shop. Every month, using my (relatively quick and lightweight)
spreadsheet software, I enter time worked for various clients, prepare
timesheets and invoices for them... and then re-enter said data into my
(slower, less friendly) accounting package.

The regular monthly stuff is almost always the same, very cookie cutter.

Having an accounting package is almost overkill, but it supports "accountant
interoperability"[1] - and using the latter to do the former is definitely
overkill. And I've never been able to figure out the automation/recurring
capabilities, they seemed geared for more complex enterprises.

I hate the fact I enter data multiple times, I hate that I have to use the
accounting package to manage expenses, etc., etc. - but integration and
automation are complex, definitely overkill for my needs.

What I'd really like is the ability to use a spreadsheet for basic double
entry bookkeeping (there are only a handful of accounts I use regularly; I can
use the accounting package for the infrequent ones) and for entering my time,
and have dirt-simple spreadsheet functions for generating client timesheets
(sometimes based on the client's format, since my clients are often
middlemen), for generating invoices (based on my format), and for generating a
file that can be imported into my accounting package periodically.

+1 if the spreadsheet knows about regular monthly things and reminds/walks me
through them.

Lightweight, fast, cross-platform. All the things my accounting package
(Windows-only, so runs under a VM) is not.

[1] Accountants are like lawyers, IMHO: If you're unsure whether you need one,
you probably do; my annual taxes cost me more than doing them myself, but I
have greater assurance of minimizing my tax bill while staying off Revenue's
radar - audits are expensive.

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nyan_sandwich
What is a spreadsheet, really?

It's an interactive programming environment with an interface optimized for
data entry and some other things. The difference between Excel and, say,
Matlab or R, is excel's strength at data entry, visual/intuitive nature, and
total lack of accessible higher-level programming features.

So the ideal solution in this problem space, to me, looks not much like excel
at all, but more like a high-powered computation environment a-la mathematica,
except with roughly the execution model and visual/accellerated/intuitive
interface strength (and then some, as you suggest) of spreadsheets. For
example, the whole grid thing might have to go, instead making tables first
class objects in the language, and then have a strong visual representation
with an accelerated (not plain text) interface for manipulating them.

But maybe you want to take it in a different direction than I do? In any case,
excel can trace a pretty direct line to VisiCalc, with very little fundamental
reevaluation applied since 1978 or so. So you might want to consider not being
bound too closely to the "this is how spreadsheets have always been done"
thing.

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wikwocket
Best of luck to you! I suspect you don't know how large this particular
iceberg is under the surface[1], but I wish you the best. :)

1: There's a reason that POI-HSSF, the Apache Java-to-Excel library, stands
for Poor Obfuscation Implementation-Horrible SpreadSheet Format!

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beat
What I want is for people to stop using spreadsheets for anything but numbers.

There's a terrible habit just about everywhere computers are used to use Excel
as a catch-all table generator for whatever grid-like data someone wants to
capture (task lists, for example). It's a _terrible_ tool for that - the cell
editor is actively hostile to entering text. And frankly, I think the majority
of Excel use is for exactly this sort of clunky, awkward crud, not actual
spreadsheeting.

Rather than trying to build a better spreadsheet, build a better grid-oriented
text capturing device with some spreadsheet functionality.

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codingfounder
You have struck the nail on the head. I have wished for this exact thing - _a
better grid-oriented text capturing device_ \- so many times. By inverting the
focus, you have helped me look at it in a way that might just be the thing I
needed. Thank you so much.

~~~
beat
Drop me a line at the email in my profile... I'm really interested in how you
go about this. I've thought about exactly this product, but stuck on the "If
you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" effect, which is why
businesses use horrid Excel for this duty in the first place. How do you get
them to buy in? Your multi-platform approach might be the answer.

ps: Have you used any of 37signals' products? Look to them for UI simplicity.
I think there's a real danger in adding too much functionality here.

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petervandijck
Make number 1 into an API and that's your business. In other words: all these
services can easily provide a button: see this data in excel, and your service
sends the data to Google docs (or your own excel version if you must).

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Dwolb
I'd like to be able to tie blocks in block diagram to the cells in a
spreadsheet.

The use case is to view which specifications are required per functional block
in a large system.

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karolisd
Just today I had a couple issues with Excel if I wanted to save something as
JSON or if I wanted to save something as an UTF-8 encoded CSV (Excel converts
it to ASCII).

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codingfounder
I've come across several data format conversion issues, in my personal use
cases and of others. Would a reliable format conversion app be of value on its
own?

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Jongseong
My company uses the French version of MS Office and after upgrading, I can't
quite get it to generate CSV files in the right encoding needed to work with
the company's proprietary software. So I need to go through the hassle of
manually generating the CSV files in the correct format. An easy way to work
with different encodings and formats will be especially useful for
collaboration.

One thing that would be simple and useful is the ability to generate or
convert between different CSV file formats. For example, French CSV files use
semicolons instead of commas to separate values, and use commas as decimal
points.

~~~
codingfounder
Thanks for your comment, Jongseong. I'd like to learn a bit more about your
file conversion issues. Can I email you somewhere?

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jbensamo
seems like you need to define who you are tagerting first. If you want to
replace excel it's bankers, consultants etc. Anything that does not integrate
backward compatibility with excel and vba macros has 0 chance in the
marketplace - too many complex models built on this s* by banks

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o_s_m
Wolfram Alpha and MatLab integration.

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codingfounder
Thanks for the suggestion. Can you tell me how you would use such an
integration?

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throwaway344
At least for me, what would be really valuable is the ability to easily add
data from WA to a cell. For example you could type "population of Russia" into
a cell, and it would grab the integer from WA for the math. Really a low-
latency, tabular form of Wolfram Alpha would be the spreadsheet of tomorrow
alone.

