14 ms·

The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel

242 points by taylorwc 7y ago

galfarragem 7y ago
I don't understand why spreadsheets are so fervourously bashed: most times they do the job and in a fast and inclusive way. The spreadsheet is certainly one of the best tools ever invented. [0] Joel's Spolsky must-watch talk on Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- arethuza 7y ago
  And like any tool they can be abused - I really like Excel but I've seen it used for things that were unwise. I've spent months reverse engineering a vast, complex, costing application that had evolved within a spreadsheet and needed (for very good reasons) to be turned into a proper application. The really entertaining part was trying to convince people that their spreadsheet didn't actually do what they thought it did.... Edit: It was costing a complex heavy industrial process so it had logic that was basically physics right through to finance.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    I think the solution should be to have better excel reverse engineering tools. I have seen plenty of crazy complex spreadsheets that had hit a wall and were hard to refactor but the solution would never have happened if they hadn’t had excel enabling regular users to create it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- cwyers 7y ago
  Because lots of people have lived through a spreadsheet that had grown too large and too important, and the original author might be gone, and reverse engineering a spreadsheet that's hundreds of megabytes in size and has a dependency graph that's longer than a page quickly becomes... burdensome.
- lowkeyokay 7y ago
  I don’t think Excel is ever bashed for its primary use case. It’s when someone starts building complex, multi user applications things start to go wrong. It almost always becomes an entangled mess. And good luck to anyone taking over when the creator leaves. I’ve been both the creator and maintainer of such Excel applications, and I do not miss it.
  - MrEldritch 7y ago
    One thing that frequently comes to my mind - rather than trying to convince people to move to a general-purpose programming language (and ignoring all the reasons that people turn to Excel in the first place), is it possible to turn an Excel-style spreadsheet into a general-purpose programming environment that is powerful enough to do that sort of stuff? People really underrate Excel as a programming environment, honestly. Yes, it's crippled and leads people to produce massive gross un-debuggable hellsheets ... but there's reasons (beyond just "it was the only usable software that could be run on office computers") that end users with a problem to solve keep turning to it despite those flaws. The combination of reactive programming, data-first visibility, no hidden state, decent approximations to structured programming by way of click-drag-and-copy-paste, and being able to reference variables and values without needing to name them has some kind of magic to it. There's quite a bit of interesting research I've seen from Microsoft on how to take something like Excel and turn it into a non-crippled programming environment - spreadsheet-defined functions (including recursion, lambdas, and higher-order functions natively in the spreadsheet environment, without having to drop into VBA!), dynamic arrays, an alternate computation-first textual view that exists simultaneously with the data-first spreadsheet view, first-class complex data structures ... Between HyperCard, Jupyter/Mathematica notebooks, and Excel, there's a lot of common features that seem to point to a vision of a truly useful end-user-accessible programming tool, something that would let people write real, useful programs intuitively and quickly enough to be worth building them themselves for whatever they needed them for, without forcing them into condescendingly-simplified drag-and-drop "visual programming" codeless clunkfests.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Excel is a general-purpose programming environment, it has a full programming language inside it (VBA) with the ability to call out to the operating system and load functionality through DLLs. No, the way to tame Excel is to make it less general, to impose principles of structured programming on it. Separate code and data and presentation. Put some of the data in a database. Impose types on it, so Excel doesn't interpret genomes as dates etc. Make the control and data flow visible. Split it into pieces with defined responsibilities. Excel is really a "two dimensional assembler": you put an operation in each cell, and they can read any other cell, and it all executes together.
- brohee 7y ago
  Excel doesn't have a compeling, standard way of doing version control that I know of, and most Excel files mix freely data and code in the same sheet, which makes debugging pretty hard. Excel files go from assets to liabilities when they start boxing over their own weight, which happens pretty fast...
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Makes me wonder if there's a market for an Excel clone whose files are easily machine- and human-readable, and version-control friendly.
    - robbiemitchell 7y ago
      Google Sheets
      - oblio 7y ago
        Have you tried using Google Sheets? I have. You can't even cut and insert a bunch of rows. That's a primitive functionality that is very much needed that was available in Excel circa 1988 (I'm exaggerating, but it's been in Excel for at least 2 decades).
        lrem 7y ago
        While sheets is nowhere near my idea of ergonomic, I've figured out this one every time I needed it. And, despite working for Google, I'm nowhere near a regular user. Maybe your browser, or some extension, got in your way?
      - naravara 7y ago
        Sheets is way less powerful than Excel. Losing a lot of the keyboard shortcuts also makes it way less useful for power users. It also doesn't do well at generating macros and its chart generation capabilities are much less flexible.
      - bartread 7y ago
- briandear 7y ago
  > inclusive way.. How is a spreadsheet “inclusive?” What does that mean?
  - ericras 7y ago
    It means that non-programmers can do "programming".
    - pavlov 7y ago
      The quotes seem unnecessary. Programming isn't just an expert activity. Many applications offer macro recording and other facilities to create programs without scripting. Dataflow programming is often used in graphics and media applications. Spreadsheets are one very successful implementation of dataflow programming. What Excel doesn't let you do (without heroic effort in support toolchains) is software engineering...
      - mch82 7y ago
        It also allows domain experts to program. So while they may not be expert programmers, they are experts in the problem area and will come up with expert solutions.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I would wager that 10 times (perhaps 50 times or more) as many people can make a simple Excel worksheet as could program the same functionality in a mainstream, general purpose "programming" language.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  because the one you got emailed last year is out of date vs the one your boss got emailed last month which is also out of date from the finance team's version
- cfarm 7y ago
  As usable data starts getting larger, the trade off between Excel and databases will get smaller.
- pravj 7y ago
  After switching from technical to a product role, I have seen a complete change of perception towards excel/google-sheets. I still observe the passive hate towards excel by developer companions, but for me, it's a goto tool, the same as it was the case with Python, the goto language. I like to call it a fundamental or building block technology that enables you to develop things on top of it, my favorite being a finite-state-machine we modeled in a sheet. Won't be surprised if we end up talking about Google sheets being one of my favorite products.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Not only that, but Excel can tether back to a traditional rdbms for pull/push data. It's often the preferred way for PMs to interact with, for example, VSTS/TFS. There is absolutely a LOT that can be done with Excel and other spreadsheets, and it shouldn't be underestimated. I'd rather not work with them more than basic/classic usage of a more well formed data dump. I use spreadsheets for monthly finances, some historical information that fits well, and a few other use cases. I'm not big on VBA and have little desire to work in the space. I have, however, seen some amazing usage of Excel and other spreadsheets for everything from charting and pivot data, to multi-user applications tethering to other data stores.
- monkeydust 7y ago
  Agreed. The bashing does not really come from the end users / business people who benefit from the spreadsheet but those that are either competing against it (engineers) or having to take on risk through misuse (compliance).
- ibejoeb 7y ago
  As other comments have noted, it gives rise to the new problem of the proliferation of stale, incomplete, or otherwise incorrect data. Google Sheets, on the other hand, is truly compelling, and a lt of the work I've been doing lately has been using Sheets and Apps Script to build really powerful "apps" on the super-cheap. This is the stuff we used to do with VB years ago, and it would take weeks. Now I can get at least a PoC of a fully multi-user system in front of a client in a day, and they don't pay anything to host it.
_bxg1 7y ago
Spreadsheets really are the fullest realization we've seen of functional-programming-without-code, and with a built-in (rudimentary) database too. It's no wonder they kicked off the microcomputer era and remain essential to this day.
- tumetab1 7y ago
  Also the realization of the hardest trick in industry, how to scale :) Excel works very well for single users with small datasets but if the business works it breaks in various ways. Sharepoint was the solution to scale excel but it didn't seem to have been successful as a tool.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    Tons of businesses continue to function with excel without difficulty. Of course if you're shooting for a SV "unicorn" growth curve you're going to leave excel in the dust pretty quick, but a great many businesses in a wide range of industries find excel continues to meet their demands for a lot longer than you might expect.
    - jetti 7y ago
      I worked for a clearing company that mainly dealt with commodities market and option exchanges. It was a fight to get the individuals in finance to use the software we developed because they would just use Excel with macros. I had even been asked to look at one of the workbooks they were using to fix an error they had been having.
      - oblio 7y ago
        The problem with the software you developed is that they have to give up control. Every change is a change request which needs to be approved and implemented and tested and released. The upside is higher quality, the downside is way reduced turnaround speed if they need to change something. I understand why people using Excel are often reluctant to give it up.
gk1 7y ago
Another way of stating this: Many SaaS companies are just CRUD apps for niche verticals. (That's not a diss at those companies.)
- sct202 7y ago
  A lot of those SaaS end up with end users dumping data down into Excel at some step, but they definitely can be wins for workflow standardization and error reduction versus trying to do it all in Excel.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  Definitely lots of truth to that. The goal to riches is just finding a niche thats big enough to create a software company for, but small enough that someone like salesforce won't show up and crush you.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
Does the author mixes up "spreadsheet" with "database" or "data entry" or even "line-of-business app" in general? There's more than spreadsheet in many of SaaS examples.
- cwyers 7y ago
  If you've never seen a spreadsheet used for all three of those, I envy you.
wills_forward 7y ago
‘Every enterprise software startup is an attempt to replace a spreadsheet.’ —wish I remembered who said that originally
- rsimmonds 7y ago
  David Sacks had a great tweet about this concept a while back: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904
jweir 7y ago
Excel is not a competitor to our SaaS - it is an interface. Original our service was web and email only (energy market financial data). But we quickly learned our clients want and need that data in CSV so they can build their own tools. So our API integrates well with Excel. And that is the power of Excel - a client can build their own solution, backed by our service. We do the parts that Excel can’t do or do well. This frees us up from the pressure to build customization for any client - we won’t do customization only generalization. We will create new features without any UI - just the API for JSON and CSV. This lowers our costs and development time - UI can be expensive and time consuming.
- mmckelvy 7y ago
  This. A spreadsheet is the best UI for most data intensive / business apps.
  - glaberficken 7y ago
    This is exactly how we use Excel where I work (a large multinational contact-center provider). Data is stored in SQL Server and then consumed in Excel in several ways: - Direct query from Excel to SQL Server (This is fast, reliable but users need to know SQL) - Cube pivot or formulas to SQL Server Analysis Services (Lower user skills needed, but depends on IT/Dev to setup correct measures and processes in Analysis Services) - Using MS Access as an intermediary between Excel and SQL Server (Using MS Access in the middle is a great way to allow people that don't know SQL to build some simple joins. Comes at the cost of query performance though.) - Using MS Power BI to connect to SQL Server data (this is in its early days at my company, but is proving to be a great solution for historical reports, where Excel usually shows its limitations)
andreyazimov 7y ago
Nice! Spreadsheets are pretty good CMS as well, so people can use it to create websites without code. I made an app called https://Sheet2Site.com https://Sheet2Site.com which takes your spreadsheet of items/objects and translates it into an app, with filters.
mmckelvy 7y ago
I actually think there's an opportunity in the opposite direction: convert your SaaS apps to spreadsheets. Instead of having to log into 10 different SaaS apps, you simply make a few menu selections from within Excel / GSheets and your data is pulled in, ready to be analyzed. The spreadsheet becomes the UI, and the SaaS "apps" are basically databases accessed via an API.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  This was my thought as I read through the comments. Email and spreadsheets are great, they’ll be around in five years. Almost nothing else is so dependable (besides having to pay taxes).
- dpoochieni 7y ago
  Could you elaborate? I'm struggling to come up with examples. Thanks
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    The following was somewhere else in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20084340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20084340
  - dktoao 7y ago
    The company that makes many of the Google Sheets add-ons (https://www.ghostwrench.net/ https://www.ghostwrench.net/) that I use at work has made this their bread and butter. Google Sheets IS the interface to their software.
- paulkon 7y ago
  Isn't that what Zapier's Excel integrations aim to provide?
brianm 7y ago
FWIW, I have seen (and have recommended) designing a number of applications with the spreadsheet as their front end. This works particularly well with google sheets, given its reasonable API. It is way richer than anything you will quickly build, is designed for mucking with tabular data (and makes it relatively easy), and it turns out a ton of applications are basically interfaces on tabular data. Hey hey!
henning 7y ago
It is an opportunity, but not an easy one. Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc). You have to convince customers that what they have going is not actually working, which requires having a discussion about how just because poor data management practices have thus far failed to completely destroy your company, they are wasting tons of time and money. Many of them will have in the back of their mind that they can always go back to how things were before. So the behavioral change/change management aspect of a product that really does directly compete against Excel is very challenging.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc). All of the things you just mentioned could be handled using just two mechanisms: 1) An extremely low friction way of flowing data to/from spreadsheets 2) Automated publishing/versioning If a particular piece of automation for flowing data between and in/out of spreadsheets is the lowest friction for users, then that will be the way they use by default. Then that software will be able to provide collaboration, fine-grained permissions, referential integrity, validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation, ingestion, and auditing. Tracking versions takes care of the rest. The trick isn't providing all of those facilities. We've known how to do that for many years. The trick is to provide all of those with near zero friction. What's needed is something like Dropbox, plus dataflow. Just let users save their files, and it gets versioned and uploaded into "staging" for the dataflow part without their having to do anything. Then, as people start running into issues of scaling, enforcement, etc, enable them to start incrementally adopting more administration features -- all while preserving the transparent "it just works" magic of their just saving the file.
- la_barba 7y ago
  It is extremely hard to convince someone they're doing it wrong, when what they're doing is working for them and is making them money. Its pretty much ingrained in our human nature, I think. Instead of telling them their solution blows, its better to gain trust by first addressing the pain points without any major rework, and then slowly change the system bit by bit, with each bit providing an instant usable benefit to the end user.
abakker 7y ago
I don't know why nobody mentions this, but if you DO unbundle a feature from excel, it is exceptionally hard to compete on ubiquity. Excel is cheap, and even if you replace part of the functionality, nobody will ever actually beat the price. Personally, I wish I had an excel-like interface for Python/Pandas. Instead of sheets, give me modular data frames, and give me a nice GUI for data import/export/connection. But, the best feature of excel is that the interpreter is built in. No version control, no wondering which version of whatever library is installed. If it is excel, it (mostly) works when I send a file to someone. Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant.
- i_s 7y ago
  > Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant. This is the main reason why I don't use products like Airtable or Notion, even though they are otherwise very compelling. Charging $10-40 for every user, even people who may log in once every few months (and maybe don't even change data) makes no sense. At that price, even excel files on a network drive is better.
  - abakker 7y ago
    FWIW, Airtable has sensible defaults for this. you can share a table for free (password protected) with non-airtable users. (I do use that for specific team projects)
rahimnathwani 7y ago
I'm surprised neither the article nor any of the HN comments have (so far) mentioned Airtable. Airtable seems to have the main advantage of Excel (it can be customised by a non-technical user) whilst solving some of the limitations (e.g. multi-user, permissions, workflow triggers). Someone who would have built their CRM tool in Excel in the past, might well choose Airtable today.
- i_s 7y ago
  Airtable looks great, but seems incredibly expensive at $10-40 / user. There are a lot of situations where pricing like this makes no sense, e.g., if you want every employee to have access to your data, but most of them only check or enter data once every few months.
  - thirdsun 7y ago
    That’s my impression as well. I use Airtable, as well as Notion, personally in a single user environment and could see countless use cases for our team at work, but Airtable is simply too expensive and even in its highest tier the number of allowed records per base seems limited, or “increased” according to their pricing table.
- joaomacp 7y ago
  I also ctrl-f'ed Airtable. It's the first one that came to my mind, the article should have mentioned it.
jwr 7y ago
As the author of a specialized inventory management application (a small ERP/MRP for electronics production, https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/), I definitely agree. Spreadsheet is my biggest competitor, but also a great opportunity: while you can start tracking inventory using a spreadsheet, you always eventually outgrow it, which is my opportunity.
purplezooey 7y ago
I mean, Workday? That's a bit of a stretch.
subpixel 7y ago
This is the second front-page post today that is a link to a content marketing firm's own content marketing.
johnrob 7y ago
Spreadsheets could also be understood as just a fancy pen/paper for a manual business process. Looking at it this way, the competition isn’t excel but rather doing things by hand (i.e. a non-solution vs a competitor).
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Feels like a ton of business could just benefit from automating various spreadsheet tasks via Zapier. I mean this stuff exists and it’s not rocket science but people don’t care to figure it out. I think part of it is people also not wanting to replace themselves out of a job. Does Betty really want to take that 1 hr daily task and turn it into 5 minute weekly task? I don’t know... maybe not.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Ye I agree, but automation breaks down when you need to change and then you need to commandeer programmers and engineers. Telling Betty what to do is way more agile than having a task put in the bottom of some Scrum backlog.
la_barba 7y ago
Ironically, I work in a regulated industry and every software we use has to be compliant with certain government regulations. We would actually love it if we got to use excel in our business workflow, but we're forced to deal with some horribly ungodly mess of softwares that cost tens of thousands of dollars, that do nothing more than have the magic "compliant with X" sticker.
- tabtab 7y ago
  There may be a good reason for it. Excel may be quick to set up, but is not known for data integrity. You don't want important data being subject to willy-nilly changes. Just because I can quickly make a boat with duct-tape and 2x4's doesn't mean I'm ready for an Atlantic crossing.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Well.. everything starts out with good intention :)
anbop 7y ago
The problem with SaaS alternatives to Excel business processes is the difficulty of linking data between apps. Let’s say you want to answer some topical question, like “are code reviews for women and men written with a different tone?” You have a HR system that has people’s gender, and a code review system, and some Google API that measures tone. Good luck stitching this together between vendors. But dump it to Excel and make the API call from VBA and it’s easy. The problem of course is that this becomes an important business metric, making the spreadsheet a critical business application, but without any of the tooling used for successful software development (version control, code review, test automation)
seancoleman 7y ago
After using Airtable for some critical LOB applications, I'm beginning to think that Excel's biggest competitor is Airtable.
stefano77it 7y ago
for those who feel the need to version control of excel sheet content (only values, not formulas) I published a tool (only VBA code) I wrote to export the content of every rows of selected sheets (a text file for each row of data, using a unique id contained in the table as filename). the gist is here: https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def8527194f39ffb8 https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def852719...
matchagaucho 7y ago
Excel's API are increasingly web service friendly. How many people prefer Slack native desktop over the web experience? Excel is the ultimate rich client experience for power users. Maybe we should brining the web to Excel, rather than the other way around?
Dwolb 7y ago
I actually think this article is late and we’re already seeing the next evolution of this trend: flexible SaaS. Right now SaaS products are mostly single-purpose workflows and aren’t super customizable (until the start-up ages and enters a few enterprises who demand customizations). This is a step-up from Excel which was general purpose but didn’t facilitate workflows seamlessly. However what Airtable is finding is almost any specific SaaS can be recreated with general purpose spreadsheet-like products. Essentially they merged the ease of use of Excel with additional shared workflows of SaaS.
rmm 7y ago
My anecdote. I work with mining (resource) companies and am mining engineer myself. I reckon one large company coming into our office and spending 2 hours describing their new software to assist with blast design. They gave us a trial and while it was slick, it was not much better than our spreadsheet, that everyone can use and the few extra features they showed we easily implemented ourselves in the spreadsheet. Hate to think how much money was spent developing this software that literally was a pretty GUI over a spreadsheet.
elliekelly 7y ago
How is AirTable not mentioned in this article? If Excel has any major startup competitor my money is on them. I use spreadsheets constantly and work with a lot of people who aren’t the savviest when it comes to technology. AirTable essentially lets them “program” even easier than Excel but also has sharing/snapshots of changes over time that everyone can see. It’s not quite a replacement for Excel yet but I absolutely see it heading that direction.
tmaly 7y ago
I could imagine a hybrid approach using Google Forms feeding into Google sheets then apply a programming layer via the sheets api

242 points by taylorwc 7y ago

I don't understand why spreadsheets are so fervourously bashed: most times they do the job and in a fast and inclusive way. The spreadsheet is certainly one of the best tools ever invented. [0] Joel's Spolsky must-watch talk on Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

arethuza 7y ago
And like any tool they can be abused - I really like Excel but I've seen it used for things that were unwise. I've spent months reverse engineering a vast, complex, costing application that had evolved within a spreadsheet and needed (for very good reasons) to be turned into a proper application. The really entertaining part was trying to convince people that their spreadsheet didn't actually do what they thought it did.... Edit: It was costing a complex heavy industrial process so it had logic that was basically physics right through to finance.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I think the solution should be to have better excel reverse engineering tools. I have seen plenty of crazy complex spreadsheets that had hit a wall and were hard to refactor but the solution would never have happened if they hadn’t had excel enabling regular users to create it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cwyers 7y ago
Because lots of people have lived through a spreadsheet that had grown too large and too important, and the original author might be gone, and reverse engineering a spreadsheet that's hundreds of megabytes in size and has a dependency graph that's longer than a page quickly becomes... burdensome.
lowkeyokay 7y ago
I don’t think Excel is ever bashed for its primary use case. It’s when someone starts building complex, multi user applications things start to go wrong. It almost always becomes an entangled mess. And good luck to anyone taking over when the creator leaves. I’ve been both the creator and maintainer of such Excel applications, and I do not miss it.
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  One thing that frequently comes to my mind - rather than trying to convince people to move to a general-purpose programming language (and ignoring all the reasons that people turn to Excel in the first place), is it possible to turn an Excel-style spreadsheet into a general-purpose programming environment that is powerful enough to do that sort of stuff? People really underrate Excel as a programming environment, honestly. Yes, it's crippled and leads people to produce massive gross un-debuggable hellsheets ... but there's reasons (beyond just "it was the only usable software that could be run on office computers") that end users with a problem to solve keep turning to it despite those flaws. The combination of reactive programming, data-first visibility, no hidden state, decent approximations to structured programming by way of click-drag-and-copy-paste, and being able to reference variables and values without needing to name them has some kind of magic to it. There's quite a bit of interesting research I've seen from Microsoft on how to take something like Excel and turn it into a non-crippled programming environment - spreadsheet-defined functions (including recursion, lambdas, and higher-order functions natively in the spreadsheet environment, without having to drop into VBA!), dynamic arrays, an alternate computation-first textual view that exists simultaneously with the data-first spreadsheet view, first-class complex data structures ... Between HyperCard, Jupyter/Mathematica notebooks, and Excel, there's a lot of common features that seem to point to a vision of a truly useful end-user-accessible programming tool, something that would let people write real, useful programs intuitively and quickly enough to be worth building them themselves for whatever they needed them for, without forcing them into condescendingly-simplified drag-and-drop "visual programming" codeless clunkfests.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Excel is a general-purpose programming environment, it has a full programming language inside it (VBA) with the ability to call out to the operating system and load functionality through DLLs. No, the way to tame Excel is to make it less general, to impose principles of structured programming on it. Separate code and data and presentation. Put some of the data in a database. Impose types on it, so Excel doesn't interpret genomes as dates etc. Make the control and data flow visible. Split it into pieces with defined responsibilities. Excel is really a "two dimensional assembler": you put an operation in each cell, and they can read any other cell, and it all executes together.
brohee 7y ago
Excel doesn't have a compeling, standard way of doing version control that I know of, and most Excel files mix freely data and code in the same sheet, which makes debugging pretty hard. Excel files go from assets to liabilities when they start boxing over their own weight, which happens pretty fast...
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Makes me wonder if there's a market for an Excel clone whose files are easily machine- and human-readable, and version-control friendly.
  - robbiemitchell 7y ago
    Google Sheets
    - oblio 7y ago
      Have you tried using Google Sheets? I have. You can't even cut and insert a bunch of rows. That's a primitive functionality that is very much needed that was available in Excel circa 1988 (I'm exaggerating, but it's been in Excel for at least 2 decades).
      - lrem 7y ago
        While sheets is nowhere near my idea of ergonomic, I've figured out this one every time I needed it. And, despite working for Google, I'm nowhere near a regular user. Maybe your browser, or some extension, got in your way?
    - naravara 7y ago
      Sheets is way less powerful than Excel. Losing a lot of the keyboard shortcuts also makes it way less useful for power users. It also doesn't do well at generating macros and its chart generation capabilities are much less flexible.
    - bartread 7y ago
briandear 7y ago
> inclusive way.. How is a spreadsheet “inclusive?” What does that mean?
- ericras 7y ago
  It means that non-programmers can do "programming".
  - pavlov 7y ago
    The quotes seem unnecessary. Programming isn't just an expert activity. Many applications offer macro recording and other facilities to create programs without scripting. Dataflow programming is often used in graphics and media applications. Spreadsheets are one very successful implementation of dataflow programming. What Excel doesn't let you do (without heroic effort in support toolchains) is software engineering...
    - mch82 7y ago
      It also allows domain experts to program. So while they may not be expert programmers, they are experts in the problem area and will come up with expert solutions.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I would wager that 10 times (perhaps 50 times or more) as many people can make a simple Excel worksheet as could program the same functionality in a mainstream, general purpose "programming" language.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
liveoneggs 7y ago
because the one you got emailed last year is out of date vs the one your boss got emailed last month which is also out of date from the finance team's version
cfarm 7y ago
As usable data starts getting larger, the trade off between Excel and databases will get smaller.
pravj 7y ago
After switching from technical to a product role, I have seen a complete change of perception towards excel/google-sheets. I still observe the passive hate towards excel by developer companions, but for me, it's a goto tool, the same as it was the case with Python, the goto language. I like to call it a fundamental or building block technology that enables you to develop things on top of it, my favorite being a finite-state-machine we modeled in a sheet. Won't be surprised if we end up talking about Google sheets being one of my favorite products.
tracker1 7y ago
Not only that, but Excel can tether back to a traditional rdbms for pull/push data. It's often the preferred way for PMs to interact with, for example, VSTS/TFS. There is absolutely a LOT that can be done with Excel and other spreadsheets, and it shouldn't be underestimated. I'd rather not work with them more than basic/classic usage of a more well formed data dump. I use spreadsheets for monthly finances, some historical information that fits well, and a few other use cases. I'm not big on VBA and have little desire to work in the space. I have, however, seen some amazing usage of Excel and other spreadsheets for everything from charting and pivot data, to multi-user applications tethering to other data stores.
monkeydust 7y ago
Agreed. The bashing does not really come from the end users / business people who benefit from the spreadsheet but those that are either competing against it (engineers) or having to take on risk through misuse (compliance).
ibejoeb 7y ago
As other comments have noted, it gives rise to the new problem of the proliferation of stale, incomplete, or otherwise incorrect data. Google Sheets, on the other hand, is truly compelling, and a lt of the work I've been doing lately has been using Sheets and Apps Script to build really powerful "apps" on the super-cheap. This is the stuff we used to do with VB years ago, and it would take weeks. Now I can get at least a PoC of a fully multi-user system in front of a client in a day, and they don't pay anything to host it.

_bxg1 7y ago

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

tumetab1 7y ago
Also the realization of the hardest trick in industry, how to scale :) Excel works very well for single users with small datasets but if the business works it breaks in various ways. Sharepoint was the solution to scale excel but it didn't seem to have been successful as a tool.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Tons of businesses continue to function with excel without difficulty. Of course if you're shooting for a SV "unicorn" growth curve you're going to leave excel in the dust pretty quick, but a great many businesses in a wide range of industries find excel continues to meet their demands for a lot longer than you might expect.
  - jetti 7y ago
    I worked for a clearing company that mainly dealt with commodities market and option exchanges. It was a fight to get the individuals in finance to use the software we developed because they would just use Excel with macros. I had even been asked to look at one of the workbooks they were using to fix an error they had been having.
    - oblio 7y ago
      The problem with the software you developed is that they have to give up control. Every change is a change request which needs to be approved and implemented and tested and released. The upside is higher quality, the downside is way reduced turnaround speed if they need to change something. I understand why people using Excel are often reluctant to give it up.

gk1 7y ago

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

sct202 7y ago
A lot of those SaaS end up with end users dumping data down into Excel at some step, but they definitely can be wins for workflow standardization and error reduction versus trying to do it all in Excel.
notfromhere 7y ago
Definitely lots of truth to that. The goal to riches is just finding a niche thats big enough to create a software company for, but small enough that someone like salesforce won't show up and crush you.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

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

cwyers 7y ago
If you've never seen a spreadsheet used for all three of those, I envy you.

wills_forward 7y ago

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

rsimmonds 7y ago
David Sacks had a great tweet about this concept a while back: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1078755080478715904

jweir 7y ago

Excel is not a competitor to our SaaS - it is an interface. Original our service was web and email only (energy market financial data). But we quickly learned our clients want and need that data in CSV so they can build their own tools. So our API integrates well with Excel. And that is the power of Excel - a client can build their own solution, backed by our service. We do the parts that Excel can’t do or do well. This frees us up from the pressure to build customization for any client - we won’t do customization only generalization. We will create new features without any UI - just the API for JSON and CSV. This lowers our costs and development time - UI can be expensive and time consuming.

mmckelvy 7y ago
This. A spreadsheet is the best UI for most data intensive / business apps.
- glaberficken 7y ago
  This is exactly how we use Excel where I work (a large multinational contact-center provider). Data is stored in SQL Server and then consumed in Excel in several ways: - Direct query from Excel to SQL Server (This is fast, reliable but users need to know SQL) - Cube pivot or formulas to SQL Server Analysis Services (Lower user skills needed, but depends on IT/Dev to setup correct measures and processes in Analysis Services) - Using MS Access as an intermediary between Excel and SQL Server (Using MS Access in the middle is a great way to allow people that don't know SQL to build some simple joins. Comes at the cost of query performance though.) - Using MS Power BI to connect to SQL Server data (this is in its early days at my company, but is proving to be a great solution for historical reports, where Excel usually shows its limitations)

andreyazimov 7y ago

Nice! Spreadsheets are pretty good CMS as well, so people can use it to create websites without code. I made an app called https://Sheet2Site.com https://Sheet2Site.com which takes your spreadsheet of items/objects and translates it into an app, with filters.

mmckelvy 7y ago

I actually think there's an opportunity in the opposite direction: convert your SaaS apps to spreadsheets. Instead of having to log into 10 different SaaS apps, you simply make a few menu selections from within Excel / GSheets and your data is pulled in, ready to be analyzed. The spreadsheet becomes the UI, and the SaaS "apps" are basically databases accessed via an API.

marmaduke 7y ago
This was my thought as I read through the comments. Email and spreadsheets are great, they’ll be around in five years. Almost nothing else is so dependable (besides having to pay taxes).
dpoochieni 7y ago
Could you elaborate? I'm struggling to come up with examples. Thanks
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  The following was somewhere else in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20084340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20084340
- dktoao 7y ago
  The company that makes many of the Google Sheets add-ons (https://www.ghostwrench.net/ https://www.ghostwrench.net/) that I use at work has made this their bread and butter. Google Sheets IS the interface to their software.
paulkon 7y ago
Isn't that what Zapier's Excel integrations aim to provide?

brianm 7y ago

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

henning 7y ago

It is an opportunity, but not an easy one. Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc). You have to convince customers that what they have going is not actually working, which requires having a discussion about how just because poor data management practices have thus far failed to completely destroy your company, they are wasting tons of time and money. Many of them will have in the back of their mind that they can always go back to how things were before. So the behavioral change/change management aspect of a product that really does directly compete against Excel is very challenging.

stcredzero 7y ago
Spreadsheets are good and fine until they're not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don't want to learn, etc). All of the things you just mentioned could be handled using just two mechanisms: 1) An extremely low friction way of flowing data to/from spreadsheets 2) Automated publishing/versioning If a particular piece of automation for flowing data between and in/out of spreadsheets is the lowest friction for users, then that will be the way they use by default. Then that software will be able to provide collaboration, fine-grained permissions, referential integrity, validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation, ingestion, and auditing. Tracking versions takes care of the rest. The trick isn't providing all of those facilities. We've known how to do that for many years. The trick is to provide all of those with near zero friction. What's needed is something like Dropbox, plus dataflow. Just let users save their files, and it gets versioned and uploaded into "staging" for the dataflow part without their having to do anything. Then, as people start running into issues of scaling, enforcement, etc, enable them to start incrementally adopting more administration features -- all while preserving the transparent "it just works" magic of their just saving the file.
la_barba 7y ago
It is extremely hard to convince someone they're doing it wrong, when what they're doing is working for them and is making them money. Its pretty much ingrained in our human nature, I think. Instead of telling them their solution blows, its better to gain trust by first addressing the pain points without any major rework, and then slowly change the system bit by bit, with each bit providing an instant usable benefit to the end user.

abakker 7y ago

I don't know why nobody mentions this, but if you DO unbundle a feature from excel, it is exceptionally hard to compete on ubiquity. Excel is cheap, and even if you replace part of the functionality, nobody will ever actually beat the price. Personally, I wish I had an excel-like interface for Python/Pandas. Instead of sheets, give me modular data frames, and give me a nice GUI for data import/export/connection. But, the best feature of excel is that the interpreter is built in. No version control, no wondering which version of whatever library is installed. If it is excel, it (mostly) works when I send a file to someone. Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant.

i_s 7y ago
> Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a better job have a per/seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant. This is the main reason why I don't use products like Airtable or Notion, even though they are otherwise very compelling. Charging $10-40 for every user, even people who may log in once every few months (and maybe don't even change data) makes no sense. At that price, even excel files on a network drive is better.
- abakker 7y ago
  FWIW, Airtable has sensible defaults for this. you can share a table for free (password protected) with non-airtable users. (I do use that for specific team projects)

rahimnathwani 7y ago

I'm surprised neither the article nor any of the HN comments have (so far) mentioned Airtable. Airtable seems to have the main advantage of Excel (it can be customised by a non-technical user) whilst solving some of the limitations (e.g. multi-user, permissions, workflow triggers). Someone who would have built their CRM tool in Excel in the past, might well choose Airtable today.

i_s 7y ago
Airtable looks great, but seems incredibly expensive at $10-40 / user. There are a lot of situations where pricing like this makes no sense, e.g., if you want every employee to have access to your data, but most of them only check or enter data once every few months.
- thirdsun 7y ago
  That’s my impression as well. I use Airtable, as well as Notion, personally in a single user environment and could see countless use cases for our team at work, but Airtable is simply too expensive and even in its highest tier the number of allowed records per base seems limited, or “increased” according to their pricing table.
joaomacp 7y ago
I also ctrl-f'ed Airtable. It's the first one that came to my mind, the article should have mentioned it.

jwr 7y ago

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

purplezooey 7y ago

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

subpixel 7y ago

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

johnrob 7y ago

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

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

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

rightbyte 7y ago
Ye I agree, but automation breaks down when you need to change and then you need to commandeer programmers and engineers. Telling Betty what to do is way more agile than having a task put in the bottom of some Scrum backlog.

la_barba 7y ago

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

tabtab 7y ago
There may be a good reason for it. Excel may be quick to set up, but is not known for data integrity. You don't want important data being subject to willy-nilly changes. Just because I can quickly make a boat with duct-tape and 2x4's doesn't mean I'm ready for an Atlantic crossing.
- la_barba 7y ago
  Well.. everything starts out with good intention :)

anbop 7y ago

The problem with SaaS alternatives to Excel business processes is the difficulty of linking data between apps. Let’s say you want to answer some topical question, like “are code reviews for women and men written with a different tone?” You have a HR system that has people’s gender, and a code review system, and some Google API that measures tone. Good luck stitching this together between vendors. But dump it to Excel and make the API call from VBA and it’s easy. The problem of course is that this becomes an important business metric, making the spreadsheet a critical business application, but without any of the tooling used for successful software development (version control, code review, test automation)

seancoleman 7y ago

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

stefano77it 7y ago

for those who feel the need to version control of excel sheet content (only values, not formulas) I published a tool (only VBA code) I wrote to export the content of every rows of selected sheets (a text file for each row of data, using a unique id contained in the table as filename). the gist is here: https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def8527194f39ffb8 https://gist.github.com/stefano77it/ea8f20efebc9d51def852719...

matchagaucho 7y ago

Excel's API are increasingly web service friendly. How many people prefer Slack native desktop over the web experience? Excel is the ultimate rich client experience for power users. Maybe we should brining the web to Excel, rather than the other way around?

Dwolb 7y ago

I actually think this article is late and we’re already seeing the next evolution of this trend: flexible SaaS. Right now SaaS products are mostly single-purpose workflows and aren’t super customizable (until the start-up ages and enters a few enterprises who demand customizations). This is a step-up from Excel which was general purpose but didn’t facilitate workflows seamlessly. However what Airtable is finding is almost any specific SaaS can be recreated with general purpose spreadsheet-like products. Essentially they merged the ease of use of Excel with additional shared workflows of SaaS.

rmm 7y ago

My anecdote. I work with mining (resource) companies and am mining engineer myself. I reckon one large company coming into our office and spending 2 hours describing their new software to assist with blast design. They gave us a trial and while it was slick, it was not much better than our spreadsheet, that everyone can use and the few extra features they showed we easily implemented ourselves in the spreadsheet. Hate to think how much money was spent developing this software that literally was a pretty GUI over a spreadsheet.

elliekelly 7y ago

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

tmaly 7y ago

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