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Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages
- nailer 7y agoI'm surprised MS Office development seems to have just...stopped. Powerpoint can't import an SVG (it turns it into a low res raster image). Powerpoint can't export SVG either, if I want to use a Powerpoint diagram in a web page. I opened a JSON file in Excel expecting to see nested values and nope, it doesn't support that file format. Office isn't even available in the Windows app store. When Microsoft's going full steam ahead with stuff like Terminal, VSCode, OneDrive, Edgium, etc Office seems to be stuck in 2005.
- antigirl 7y agoWell everyone is using google docs/sheets/slides google slides support SVG btw https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/
- Vaslo 7y agoNot at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.
- ymolodtsov 7y agoThat’s probably true, but in the most of the cases when it gets too complicataed for Google Sheets it shouldn’t be a spreadsheet at all. KPMG consultants sent us a lot of forms built in spreadsheets and that’s an abomination that should have been a simple webpage.
- crispyambulance 7y agoI'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done. Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly. In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!
- Vaslo 7y agoYou are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.
- antigirl 7y agoFair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoI'm a dev and I have Office installed. You have a lot of assumptions going on, apparently.
- antigirl 7y agoFull office suite I hope. enjoy
- TeMPOraL 7y agoConsider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does. Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability. Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel. The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?
- smt88 7y agoHas it stopped, or are you maybe not the target/average user? Most Office users have no idea what SVG or JSON files are or why they'd use them. My experience is that Office has prioritized usability and automating tedious tasks, like theming, creating charts, and linking data back and forth. Every major version over the last 15 years has made some large usability improvements (e.g. format painter), but perhaps you'd only notice them if you're using the applications in certain ways. I've noticed them and feel like I'm stuck in molasses whenever I have to use an older version of Office.
- nailer 7y agoA lot of people who work with data use Excel and JSON. Not most Excel users, but about as many as who know what VLOOKUP is.
- wtvanhest 7y agoJust out of curiousity, who uses JSON in excel and why? (I work in corp finance, and use excel extensively)
- smt88 7y agoExcel is huge in finance, accounting, and marketing. I don't know why anyone in those fields would routinely use JSON files. If there's JSON somewhere that's relevant, a dev will usually just change output to CSV or something.
- mipmap04 7y agoNew versions of Excel allow you to import JSON through PowerQuery in the Data tab on the ribbon. Works pretty well.
- JorgeGT 7y agoUhm, I can import vector SVGs into Powerpoint (2019 or Office 365) just fine.
- nailer 7y agoI can too. Then I resize them and they get blurry because it's converted them to bitmap, as mentioned in the comment you're replying to. Powerpoint Office 365 insiders build, the latest possible public release.
- JorgeGT 7y agoThat's weird. My SVGs do not get rasterized when resizing. I just tried (Powerpoint 2019) and I can resize, move, turn, mirror, cut etc. and they stay in vector form.
- nailer 7y agoHrm thanks for the feedback (and sorry for being snappy). I had a play and it looks like some things work and others don't: - Copying and pasting from a vector app into Powerpoint makes a bitmap import - Dragging an SVG file from Explorer into Powerpoint works properly
- techslave 7y agocorrect. copy paste even from a vector app comes in as bitmap. you have to use file->import or drag drop.
- jve 7y ago> ...Office seems to be stuck in 2005 That's false. Some features not available at 2005: - 2007: Ribbon UI - PowerPivot / PowerQuery / PowerView - Integration with OneDrive (Office talks to server) - Office Online Server (Office Lite in web in cloud or self hosted) - Not a feature, but subscription model + value added services users get.
- nailer 7y agoI didn't mean that there's been no changes to office. Rather that office hasn't kept up with the modern habits. Office is a world when vector graphics are in EPS, people don't want to re use diagrams in web pages, and app stores aren't mainstream. Office having adopted tabbed toolbars in 2007 doesn't change that.
- moontear 7y agoPowerPoint supports importing SVGs since at least 2016. I am using them constantly and do everything in SVG. Export to SVG you can’t - but online converters make that easy. Excel Supports JSON and s bunch of other stuff via PowerQuery which is the new way to do things. Office Development is totally fine, but I would agree with you that development of Add-Ins is slow and there aren’t many I would use.
- techslave 7y agoeh? i’ve just last month done both those things. svg no raster and direct json import
- igammarays 7y agoVery cleanly done - though I really doubt this needs to be a subscription. I'm gonna keep this in my notes - it may come in handy someday for a one-off report or presentation, for which I would gladly plunk down a few bucks.
- mikeintosh 7y agoLove your logo!
- Bishonen88 7y agoIs this the OP posting? Out of everything on the page, the logo is possibly the worst part of it (a 'P' in a circle). And this made you create an account and then post here?
- slowmotiony 7y agoThis is amazing, but there is no way that my firm will send any excels with our data to a relatively small and unknown third-party provider who will host it on a public URL. Are you thinking about allowing users to run this on-site?
- smt88 7y agoI was about to say the same. I'd pay for a license to use a self-hosted version.
- tyingq 7y agoSheetjs.com seems in the same space and you can self host.
- lucasverra 7y agoyou need a dev to make that work. I guess OP value is "no dev needed"
- tyingq 7y agoThat's true, though the things in the demos directory would simplify that.
- tiagoalves 7y agoThis is a valid concern that people have shared with me before. It isn't in my immediate plans yet but depending on more feedback, we might offer an on-site solution in the future.
- keatr 7y agoreally amazing one
- sgarrity 7y agoCool idea. I like how focused it is. I'd love to be able to see an example without signing up though.
- tiagoalves 7y agoHaven't gotten around updating the landing page yet but here is an example: https://www.publisheet.com/demos/quotation-demo https://www.publisheet.com/demos/quotation-demo. Just tap the screen or move your mouse over the page and you'll see which cells are editable.
- boldslogan 7y agoReally nice, tried with a chart and worked smoothly. Just for fun: would be nice to know max publishing - I just tried 1k * 30 columns and it errored out. I wanted to see how I could interact with a large chart of data.
- tiagoalves 7y agoYeah, we haven't defined a limit yet but letting it error out is definitely not acceptable. We'll fix it, thanks for the feedback.
- donclark 7y agoCould this be done via a Google sheet?
- patrickbolle 7y agoAndrey Azimov built a very similar app for Google Sheets - https://www.sheet2site.com https://www.sheet2site.com
- abdhass 7y agoAny chance of a Google Sheets version?
- keatr 7y agoreally useful service
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davidpolberger 7y agoThis looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter (https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com) and Spreadsheet Web (https://www.spreadsheetweb.com https://www.spreadsheetweb.com) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.) Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid (https://www.calculoid.com https://www.calculoid.com), Calconic (https://www.calconic.com https://www.calconic.com), uCalc Pro (https://ucalc.pro https://ucalc.pro) and Calcapp (https://www.calcapp.net/lp/website-calculators/ https://www.calcapp.net/lp/website-calculators/), that require more work to get from an Excel sheet to a web app, but get the job done with an end result that doesn't look like a spreadsheet. How does Publisheet improve on the competition? (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Calcapp.)
- samstave 7y agoOoohhhhhh i really like this info. Here is what i want, i want a cleaner way to parse a pdf into an xls or csv and be able to edit it on mobile .... Have any good references?
- mac_was 7y agoThis looks really nice but I'd like to see a more complex example with several complex functions and updating at least 500 fields at the same time. Then we see how fast it is...
- seektable 7y agoin case of complex functions / many fields it is more logical to use a database and BI tool that displays/visualizes data from this database as a report.
- mac_was 7y agoIf the tool has limitation it should say somewhere, before someone spends time building a complex example and finds out it crashes the browser.
- dlphn___xyz 7y agowhat use case would this serve?
- efa 7y agoThat was my question. Any type of shared spreadsheet I always use Google.
- andreyazimov 7y agoNice! Using spreadsheets as a DB are trend now. Also 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 Google Sheet of items/objects and translates it into an app, with filters and images
- dspillett 7y ago> Using spreadsheets as a DB are trend now. Not just a trend now, it has been a pattern for many years: if you worked in/with/for many office environments you'll be exposed to a great many "database" uses of Excel & similar and you will find features specific to such uses in spreadsheet products. Some businesses, including large investment banks, would completely grind to a halt if Excel stopped working!
- Seahawkshacker 7y agoWhy not just share or publish a locked Google sheet?
- vaibhav228 7y agoCool idea! Clean and simple UI.
- webwanderings 7y agoNot necessarily exactly like this but Google Sheet does web publishing of sheets.
- mkirsten 7y agoCheck out Molnify www.molnify.com that both have support for formulas, and allows you to publish them as APIs (disclaimer: I built it)