16 ms·

I wandered off and built an IDE

1053 points by anakic 9y ago

nolok 9y ago
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.
- jimcsharp 9y ago
  It was called ThingieQuery and HN had a bit of a fit.
- anakic 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    What about "ExcQL" ?
    - mrswilliam 9y ago
      incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Or SQXL
      - zbentley 9y ago
        SXQL rolls of the tongue easier, but might not be acceptable to management for . . . other reasons.
    - whoisthemachine 9y ago
      Or, since the original motivation came from his (presumably) ex-girlfriend, perhaps just "ExQL"?
      - anakic 9y ago
        Love it, haha <3
    - foobarchu 9y ago
      Oof. Just imagine trying to telling someone about it. "It's pronounced this way but you spell it this way" rarely ends up well, and often ends up un-searchable.
      - Sean1708 9y ago
        Or just XQL? It could be branded as eXcel Query Language.
  - hitekker 9y ago
    I think you're fine on the name. Jetbrains doesn't have dominance yet on <Foo>Storm (they only offer PhpStorm and WebStorm) and your website UI is also somewhat different from theirs.
  - dotmanish 9y ago
    You're good with the name. Don't overthink it now - it sounds business-y alright. If parent's logic were to prevail, no company name would end in 'soft' (since Microsoft) either. Doesn't hold.
  - Lich 9y ago
    What about EXCELIBUR. "USE THE LEGENDARY POWER OF EXCELIBUR TO SLAY ALL YOUR EXCEL WORRIES!" P.S.: Referring to Excalibur for those that have never heard of it. It's the legendary sword used by King Arthur.
- mrswilliam 9y ago
  incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing
- anakic 9y ago
  Oh, also it's freemium. Most of the functionality is free, you just have a label saying it's "free for non-commercial use"
  - character0 9y ago
    Having a page that describes the freemium vs pro features would be great. Maybe a simple table with checkboxes
tda 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- tga 9y ago
  It is possible to connect an Excel spreadsheet directly as an ODBC data source to Access. Then you can run SQL queries, views, reports on the data, without having to export or modify it in any way.
mrswilliam 9y ago
incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing
kanwisher 9y ago
Your blog post should probably show a picture of the product
- anakic 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Fast turnaround. That gif made a newcomer like me immediately appreciate your work.
  - anentropic 9y ago
    The GIF totally makes it clear This thing seems so obvious like it should already be a part of Excel - nice work!
laurentl 9y ago
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.
- taneq 9y ago
  This may sound weird but my go-to these days for text munging is actually PHP. Set it up as a shell script, do all your testing on the command line, and then if it's something you use a lot (or other people could use), throw it on a server somewhere with a web form at the front end to make it more accessible. Not for anything serious, but great for those occasional quick-hack utilities to save you a bunch of cut-and-pasting or data reformatting.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  I guess it's time to add Python support to QueryStorm.
  - anakic 9y ago
    I think so too!
- onychomys 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
xyproto 9y ago
@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!
- fouc 9y ago
  I think that there's a rising "Maker" culture that focuses on building first and launching fast. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0
  - xyproto 9y ago
    That is very interesting, thank you!
  - jxub 9y ago
    @levelsio also published a book on the subject recently.
    - vageli 9y ago
      Do you happen to know the title of the book?
      - slice-beans 9y ago
        https://makebook.io/ https://makebook.io/ It's pretty good so far
Insanity 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Did you use Roslyn for the C# support?
    - softawre 9y ago
      He did, it is in the article.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Ouch, my mistake. I didn't read closely enough. I'm sure the Roslyn folks would be happy about this.
escanda 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      What's a "Window queries"?
adamcharnock 9y ago
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.
dalacv 9y ago
I just took a look at QueryStorm. Very cool indeed.
ninjamayo 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Hey, I remember, same username and all!:) Thanks for saying hi, man!:)
  - ninjamayo 9y ago
    No problem. I think you did a great job persisting with your project!
iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
This looks awesome! Have you thought about joining https://wip.chat https://wip.chat Lots of fellow makers in there :)
- anakic 9y ago
  Never heard of them. I'll check 'em out, thanks!:)
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Not the OP but... What's the upside of using wip.chat? It just seems to be a public to-do list system?
  - iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Ah OK, thank you! I couldn't see any actual 'chat' feature - is that because I wasn't logged in ?
- kuschku 9y ago
  So, I'd have to pay just to get into some chat group?
gnomespaceship 9y ago
Fortunately, I don't use Excel at work, but this was a very entertaining read. Thanks @anakic!
- anakic 9y ago
  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:)
whoisthemachine 9y ago
This looks great - nice work. If I get asked to do something complex in Excel again, I may give this a go :)
ataturk 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
prab97 9y ago
So, what color is your mansion? Great project by the way!
- anakic 9y ago
  Saving up for a turquoise one:) Thanks!
kelvin0 9y ago
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-an-odbc-database https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-... 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 9y ago
  See the Dropbox HN argument. Polish.
  - thisisandyok 9y ago
    Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - levimaes 9y ago
      Holy hell, that's Drew Houston!
    - zerr 9y ago
      To be honest - dropbox is still burning investors money, right? AFAIK they are not profitable even today.
      - drgath 9y ago
        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 9y ago
        They already IPO’d. :-)
gormz 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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...
EnderMB 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    There is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/excel-add-ins-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/ex... 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.
  - phren0logy 9y ago
    With .NET running everywhere now, I'm hoping VSTO for Mac Office isn't far behind. I really want to use the Grammarly plugin on my Mac also.
  - tomaszj 9y ago
    Yeah, I'd love a version for Mac. I like what I see, but I've got a Mac-only setup. I wonder if you could make use of VSCode with Excel somehow?
jason_slack 9y ago
“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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Heh, still, chances aren't many. So far I've managed to seriously impress my SO with my computing skills just once. People from her old company asked if she'd like a side gig, involving backing up years worth of philosophical Facebook posts of their boss (he's quite a writer), into Word documents (one per post). It would be ridiculous to attempt it by hand, but by applying a small amount of Lisp and pandoc on Facebook data export dump, I was done in 3 hours. These days I mostly help her when she needs bunch of photos mangled into a format that can be accepted by upstream contractors; it usually involves some ImageMagick one-liners.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    It’s not always boys impressing girls though. Reason why I am in tech is a girl showed me how to delete a read only file from a terminal. I had never used a terminal before.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  Textbased internet surfing must be awesome.
  - jason_slack 9y ago
    You would be quite surprised actually. Try it and see how often you decide to use it over a graphical browser.
    - noam87 9y ago
      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.
mrleiter 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Seconding this. Without upfront pricing, I always assume buying a copy means handing over my email or phone to The Sales Team.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  I wouldn't guess that this was thrown-up since you made your comment: - https://www.querystorm.com/buy.html https://www.querystorm.com/buy.html
engg 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Not inside Google Sheets, there's nothing stopping you from moving your spreadsheets to Excell though.
  - anakic 9y ago
    Exactly. It just works in Excel, but if you have Excel then it makes spreadsheets easier and more useful.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  But this is solving "regular stuff at corporate work," just at someone else's work instead of his own.
synack 9y ago
Poor Anna
- akuji1993 9y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Life is complicated; if all that is true and even related, you don't know enough context to judge OP yet.
  - anakic 9y ago
    Hey, I think I should respond, as I agree with you that loved ones should not be tossed aside easily. Passion projects are pretty important too and should be fostered. It's important to please one's own being too. Anyway, it was indeed an exaggeration for comic effect. Anna (not her real name) is a lovely person. We did break up, but much later on and completely unrelated to the project. She was actually very quite happy with what I had built and had once made an angry remark about how much time I was spending on it. The majority of the article is true, but I did make up one or two twists just for the comic effect. I'm also not really interested in a mansion. So far.
  - xor1 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      I would love to find someone to love, chemistry is a very hard thing.
allisterb 9y ago
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!
tclancy 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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:)
rotub 9y ago
I read this as IED (Improvised Explosive Device)... I was disappointed. And then impressed.
galen211 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
faitswulff 9y ago
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 9y ago
  You did better than the OP relationship-wise xD
- anakic 9y ago
  Thanks and congrats to you too!:)
billconan 9y ago
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 9y ago
  And was it successful?
  - billconan 9y ago
    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.
ratsimihah 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
sigi45 9y ago
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 :(.
SnowingXIV 9y ago
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.
blurkness 9y ago
Amazing work and story! Congratz!
erdemozg 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
emodendroket 9y ago
The story is kind of goofy, but the product looks very cool indeed.
JohnStudio 9y ago
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
rufusroflpunch 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 :)
michaelmcmillan 9y ago
"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.
Bishonen88 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
clarkeni 9y ago
@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 9y ago
  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.
mwexler 9y ago
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!
rattray 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Yep, that's just what FDWs are for-- modular storage layer. Plenty of cool hacks :)
crtlaltdel 9y ago
"How did this happen? As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to impress a girl." seriously? its amazing how easily people seem to box others in
lakechfoma 9y ago
This makes me wish I had to do more grunt work in Excel.
Serow225 9y ago
An honest question, isn't this kind of what PowerBI is supposed to do?
rattray 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- anakic 9y ago
  I would love to, I just don't have the time to isolate this stuff into their own projects and popularize it.
JackFr 9y ago
My girlfriend married me for showing her Ctrl-Z.
- TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  Wait till I show her Alt-PrtSc!
- latexr 9y ago
  A former girlfriend asked me to marry her after I showed her ⌘⇧T in Firefox.
sigzero 9y ago
Now that's pretty awesome.
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
Awesome. Get people to make even more convoluted messes in Excel for me to detangle and make into a web application.
fomoz 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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
rattray 9y ago
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
pknerd 9y ago
Your story/writing is more amazing for me than IDE itself. Awesome man and sorry for your breakup.... Didn't feel good about it.
gigatexal 9y ago
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.
- ThirdFoundation 9y ago
  Yea, reading his description of the Excel data problems his girlfriend had hit very close to home. A large swath of my current job responsibilities often involve automating these type of data aggregations so that non-technical users can do them. Often, this leads me to coding the entire task in VBA so that they can do it with the push of a button within the workbook they are using. At this point I have entire libraries that I have made which I routinely use to accomplish this, but it always feels so dirty and inefficient (see: VBA). In my experience, non-technical users don't want an outside application. They don't want to set up a database. They just want to open Excel, the program they are comfortable with, hit a button, and have their data aggregated. This tool is really cool.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    couldn‘t this tool be used to ‚compile‘ the SQL or C# processing into a button?
    - anakic 9y ago
      Yep, it certainly can. It supports embedding code into the workbook and running it on defined triggers such as user interactions.
- xeonoex 9y ago
  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.
fartcannon 9y ago
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?
shimon 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- chadlavi 9y ago
  +1, this has saved my butt a few times
- mercer 9y ago
  This is exactly how I ended up at Digital Ocean (and some other paid services). Very effective!
l9k 9y ago
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.
Quarrelsome 9y ago
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?
- dgudkov 9y ago
  Check out my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com http://easymorph.com). It's pretty good for replacing VBA scripting in Excel files.
- anakic 9y ago
  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.
mistermann 9y ago
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?
SomeHacker44 9y ago
> 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...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ultrasounder 9y ago
This is slick!What a great way to impress your girlfriend.I hope you succeeded in your mission:-)
- lerpa 9y ago
  If you're referring to the mission of impressing the girlfriend, success doesn't seem likely.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
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.
tommy2big 9y ago
Hmmm. Excel has supported SQL queries against itself for at least 20 years. This includes select, insert, update, delete
- willhslade 9y ago
  Via MS Query? ADO? OLAP cubes? Care to elaborate for the newbs?
  - tommy2big 9y ago
    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-data.htm http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/msquery-excel-relational-d...
neonate 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Looks like this attempt is the winner!
  - anakic 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Yes sir, it certainly does.
  - 9y ago
sporkenfang 9y ago
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 9y ago
  That was auto-ironic, though:) I think that's the right phrase...
sairap 9y ago
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 :)
antonkm 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Yes, thank you. I see that my comment might be interpreted as sceptical. It looks great.
ramkarthikk 9y ago
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.
pkamb 9y ago
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.
dng88 9y ago
Good works. And appreciate all those comments about solving other people’s need. As said someone has been a great IT guy even though he was laughed at by bill gate that he do not know programming. He and his firm now is trying to solve problem which in many cases many do not even know that they have. Even though not everyone like this close ecology but ... Pain point sells.
HeavyStorm 9y ago
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.
totololo 9y ago
"As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to impress a girl" Gotta love the man :)
totololo 9y ago
"As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to impress a girl" :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
caseymarquis 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
tomthehero 9y ago
Well written. Entertaining. Captivating.
joepour 9y ago
“Careful calculations conclusively showed it wasn’t enough for a mansion”
profalseidol 8y ago
Good read. Good Font too. Fast website.

1053 points by anakic 9y ago

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.

jimcsharp 9y ago
It was called ThingieQuery and HN had a bit of a fit.
anakic 9y ago
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 9y ago
  What about "ExcQL" ?
  - mrswilliam 9y ago
    incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Or SQXL
    - zbentley 9y ago
      SXQL rolls of the tongue easier, but might not be acceptable to management for . . . other reasons.
  - whoisthemachine 9y ago
    Or, since the original motivation came from his (presumably) ex-girlfriend, perhaps just "ExQL"?
    - anakic 9y ago
      Love it, haha <3
  - foobarchu 9y ago
    Oof. Just imagine trying to telling someone about it. "It's pronounced this way but you spell it this way" rarely ends up well, and often ends up un-searchable.
    - Sean1708 9y ago
      Or just XQL? It could be branded as eXcel Query Language.
- hitekker 9y ago
  I think you're fine on the name. Jetbrains doesn't have dominance yet on <Foo>Storm (they only offer PhpStorm and WebStorm) and your website UI is also somewhat different from theirs.
- dotmanish 9y ago
  You're good with the name. Don't overthink it now - it sounds business-y alright. If parent's logic were to prevail, no company name would end in 'soft' (since Microsoft) either. Doesn't hold.
- Lich 9y ago
  What about EXCELIBUR. "USE THE LEGENDARY POWER OF EXCELIBUR TO SLAY ALL YOUR EXCEL WORRIES!" P.S.: Referring to Excalibur for those that have never heard of it. It's the legendary sword used by King Arthur.
mrswilliam 9y ago
incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing
anakic 9y ago
Oh, also it's freemium. Most of the functionality is free, you just have a label saying it's "free for non-commercial use"
- character0 9y ago
  Having a page that describes the freemium vs pro features would be great. Maybe a simple table with checkboxes

tda 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
tga 9y ago
It is possible to connect an Excel spreadsheet directly as an ODBC data source to Access. Then you can run SQL queries, views, reports on the data, without having to export or modify it in any way.

mrswilliam 9y ago

incase you all want to increase your credit score, spy on your partner facebook,whatsapp ,instagram to find out if they are cheating , go ahead and contact reliablehacker 2017 AT g mail DOT com they are awesome now i can get my loan , tell them i refered you so i can get a discount on my next job with them ...thank me later, they can do almost about anyhing

kanwisher 9y ago

Your blog post should probably show a picture of the product

anakic 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Fast turnaround. That gif made a newcomer like me immediately appreciate your work.
- anentropic 9y ago
  The GIF totally makes it clear This thing seems so obvious like it should already be a part of Excel - nice work!

laurentl 9y ago

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.

taneq 9y ago
This may sound weird but my go-to these days for text munging is actually PHP. Set it up as a shell script, do all your testing on the command line, and then if it's something you use a lot (or other people could use), throw it on a server somewhere with a web form at the front end to make it more accessible. Not for anything serious, but great for those occasional quick-hack utilities to save you a bunch of cut-and-pasting or data reformatting.
fiatjaf 9y ago
I guess it's time to add Python support to QueryStorm.
- anakic 9y ago
  I think so too!
onychomys 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xyproto 9y ago

@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!

fouc 9y ago
I think that there's a rising "Maker" culture that focuses on building first and launching fast. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0
- xyproto 9y ago
  That is very interesting, thank you!
- jxub 9y ago
  @levelsio also published a book on the subject recently.
  - vageli 9y ago
    Do you happen to know the title of the book?
    - slice-beans 9y ago
      https://makebook.io/ https://makebook.io/ It's pretty good so far

Insanity 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Did you use Roslyn for the C# support?
  - softawre 9y ago
    He did, it is in the article.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Ouch, my mistake. I didn't read closely enough. I'm sure the Roslyn folks would be happy about this.

escanda 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    What's a "Window queries"?

adamcharnock 9y ago

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.

dalacv 9y ago

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

ninjamayo 9y ago

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 9y ago
Hey, I remember, same username and all!:) Thanks for saying hi, man!:)
- ninjamayo 9y ago
  No problem. I think you did a great job persisting with your project!

iovrthoughtthis 9y ago

This looks awesome! Have you thought about joining https://wip.chat https://wip.chat Lots of fellow makers in there :)

anakic 9y ago
Never heard of them. I'll check 'em out, thanks!:)
Jaruzel 9y ago
Not the OP but... What's the upside of using wip.chat? It just seems to be a public to-do list system?
- iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Ah OK, thank you! I couldn't see any actual 'chat' feature - is that because I wasn't logged in ?
kuschku 9y ago
So, I'd have to pay just to get into some chat group?

gnomespaceship 9y ago

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

anakic 9y ago
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:)

whoisthemachine 9y ago

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

ataturk 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

prab97 9y ago

So, what color is your mansion? Great project by the way!

anakic 9y ago
Saving up for a turquoise one:) Thanks!

kelvin0 9y ago

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-an-odbc-database https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-... 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 9y ago
See the Dropbox HN argument. Polish.
- thisisandyok 9y ago
  Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - levimaes 9y ago
    Holy hell, that's Drew Houston!
  - zerr 9y ago
    To be honest - dropbox is still burning investors money, right? AFAIK they are not profitable even today.
    - drgath 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        They already IPO’d. :-)

gormz 9y ago

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 9y ago
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...

EnderMB 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  There is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/excel-add-ins-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/ex... 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.
- phren0logy 9y ago
  With .NET running everywhere now, I'm hoping VSTO for Mac Office isn't far behind. I really want to use the Grammarly plugin on my Mac also.
- tomaszj 9y ago
  Yeah, I'd love a version for Mac. I like what I see, but I've got a Mac-only setup. I wonder if you could make use of VSCode with Excel somehow?

jason_slack 9y ago

“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.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Heh, still, chances aren't many. So far I've managed to seriously impress my SO with my computing skills just once. People from her old company asked if she'd like a side gig, involving backing up years worth of philosophical Facebook posts of their boss (he's quite a writer), into Word documents (one per post). It would be ridiculous to attempt it by hand, but by applying a small amount of Lisp and pandoc on Facebook data export dump, I was done in 3 hours. These days I mostly help her when she needs bunch of photos mangled into a format that can be accepted by upstream contractors; it usually involves some ImageMagick one-liners.
- nojvek 9y ago
  It’s not always boys impressing girls though. Reason why I am in tech is a girl showed me how to delete a read only file from a terminal. I had never used a terminal before.
Double_a_92 9y ago
Textbased internet surfing must be awesome.
- jason_slack 9y ago
  You would be quite surprised actually. Try it and see how often you decide to use it over a graphical browser.
  - noam87 9y ago
    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.

mrleiter 9y ago

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 9y ago
Seconding this. Without upfront pricing, I always assume buying a copy means handing over my email or phone to The Sales Team.
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
I wouldn't guess that this was thrown-up since you made your comment: - https://www.querystorm.com/buy.html https://www.querystorm.com/buy.html

engg 9y ago

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 9y ago
Not inside Google Sheets, there's nothing stopping you from moving your spreadsheets to Excell though.
- anakic 9y ago
  Exactly. It just works in Excel, but if you have Excel then it makes spreadsheets easier and more useful.
emodendroket 9y ago
But this is solving "regular stuff at corporate work," just at someone else's work instead of his own.

synack 9y ago

Poor Anna

akuji1993 9y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Life is complicated; if all that is true and even related, you don't know enough context to judge OP yet.
- anakic 9y ago
  Hey, I think I should respond, as I agree with you that loved ones should not be tossed aside easily. Passion projects are pretty important too and should be fostered. It's important to please one's own being too. Anyway, it was indeed an exaggeration for comic effect. Anna (not her real name) is a lovely person. We did break up, but much later on and completely unrelated to the project. She was actually very quite happy with what I had built and had once made an angry remark about how much time I was spending on it. The majority of the article is true, but I did make up one or two twists just for the comic effect. I'm also not really interested in a mansion. So far.
- xor1 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I would love to find someone to love, chemistry is a very hard thing.

allisterb 9y ago

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!

tclancy 9y ago

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 9y ago
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:)

rotub 9y ago

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

galen211 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

faitswulff 9y ago

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 9y ago
You did better than the OP relationship-wise xD
anakic 9y ago
Thanks and congrats to you too!:)

billconan 9y ago

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 9y ago
And was it successful?
- billconan 9y ago
  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.

ratsimihah 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

sigi45 9y ago

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 :(.

SnowingXIV 9y ago

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.

blurkness 9y ago

Amazing work and story! Congratz!

erdemozg 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

emodendroket 9y ago

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

JohnStudio 9y ago

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

rufusroflpunch 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 :)

michaelmcmillan 9y ago

"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.

Bishonen88 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

clarkeni 9y ago

@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 9y ago
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.

mwexler 9y ago

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!

rattray 9y ago

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 9y ago
Yep, that's just what FDWs are for-- modular storage layer. Plenty of cool hacks :)

crtlaltdel 9y ago

"How did this happen? As with many great endeavors of man, this one also started in order to impress a girl." seriously? its amazing how easily people seem to box others in

lakechfoma 9y ago

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

Serow225 9y ago

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

rattray 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
anakic 9y ago
I would love to, I just don't have the time to isolate this stuff into their own projects and popularize it.

JackFr 9y ago

My girlfriend married me for showing her Ctrl-Z.

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
Wait till I show her Alt-PrtSc!
latexr 9y ago
A former girlfriend asked me to marry her after I showed her ⌘⇧T in Firefox.

sigzero 9y ago

Now that's pretty awesome.

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago

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

fomoz 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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

rattray 9y ago

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

pknerd 9y ago

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

gigatexal 9y ago

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.

ThirdFoundation 9y ago
Yea, reading his description of the Excel data problems his girlfriend had hit very close to home. A large swath of my current job responsibilities often involve automating these type of data aggregations so that non-technical users can do them. Often, this leads me to coding the entire task in VBA so that they can do it with the push of a button within the workbook they are using. At this point I have entire libraries that I have made which I routinely use to accomplish this, but it always feels so dirty and inefficient (see: VBA). In my experience, non-technical users don't want an outside application. They don't want to set up a database. They just want to open Excel, the program they are comfortable with, hit a button, and have their data aggregated. This tool is really cool.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  couldn‘t this tool be used to ‚compile‘ the SQL or C# processing into a button?
  - anakic 9y ago
    Yep, it certainly can. It supports embedding code into the workbook and running it on defined triggers such as user interactions.
xeonoex 9y ago
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.

fartcannon 9y ago

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?

shimon 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
chadlavi 9y ago
+1, this has saved my butt a few times
mercer 9y ago
This is exactly how I ended up at Digital Ocean (and some other paid services). Very effective!

l9k 9y ago

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.

Quarrelsome 9y ago

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?

dgudkov 9y ago
Check out my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com http://easymorph.com). It's pretty good for replacing VBA scripting in Excel files.
anakic 9y ago
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.

mistermann 9y ago

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?

SomeHacker44 9y ago

> 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...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ultrasounder 9y ago

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

lerpa 9y ago
If you're referring to the mission of impressing the girlfriend, success doesn't seem likely.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

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.

tommy2big 9y ago

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

willhslade 9y ago
Via MS Query? ADO? OLAP cubes? Care to elaborate for the newbs?
- tommy2big 9y ago
  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-data.htm http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/msquery-excel-relational-d...

neonate 9y ago

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 9y ago
Looks like this attempt is the winner!
- anakic 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Yes sir, it certainly does.
- 9y ago

sporkenfang 9y ago

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 9y ago
That was auto-ironic, though:) I think that's the right phrase...

sairap 9y ago

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 :)

antonkm 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Yes, thank you. I see that my comment might be interpreted as sceptical. It looks great.

ramkarthikk 9y ago

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.

pkamb 9y ago

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.

dng88 9y ago

Good works. And appreciate all those comments about solving other people’s need. As said someone has been a great IT guy even though he was laughed at by bill gate that he do not know programming. He and his firm now is trying to solve problem which in many cases many do not even know that they have. Even though not everyone like this close ecology but ... Pain point sells.

HeavyStorm 9y ago

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.

totololo 9y ago

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

totololo 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

caseymarquis 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

tomthehero 9y ago

Well written. Entertaining. Captivating.

joepour 9y ago

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

profalseidol 8y ago

Good read. Good Font too. Fast website.