3 ms·
Show HN: A Better Excel Data API
- kumarski 13y agoI'm having trouble figuring out the exact use case. Who is this product for?
- karamazov 13y agoThis is primarily for analytics and other data companies with non-technical customers. They get requests for data in spreadsheets, and they usually manage that by generating and sending over one-off CSV's. Voyager is an interface that's easier to use for the devs, and much easier for the end-users.
- yangcanvas 13y agoI'd imagine that the most common use cases will be the ones where people are already using excel, where the python is definitely an improvement over python, the default and only other programming language integrated with excel. I used it to validate my an algorithm written in python, which was basically a many-step series of matrix multiplications datanitro basically served as a debugger, letting me 'show my work' at each step in the algorithm, outputting matrices to excel spreadsheets as it ran. Excel provides a pretty good set for validating that the output at each step matched expectations, like conditional formatting where you can color cells based on their value and other math and graphing functionality I can say for sure that I prefer using python with excel to using VBA, the only other previous option.
- Nicholas_C 13y agoAlthough I find programming fun in general, using VBA is definitely not as fun as other languages. If I had more complicated uses for macros I would definitely shell out the $100 for it.
- karamazov 13y agoThis site is actually for a new product: an API that lets developers push data (from any language, over REST) to the spreadsheets of end-users. Not directly related to VBA or Python =)
- Nicholas_C 13y agoI know, I was just commenting on the poster's musings about DataNitro and Python/VBA. Great work btw, a really cool product.
- karamazov 13y agoHi, I'm one of the developers. Let me know if you have any questions. We'd like to get as much feedback as possible, and we have a special offer going on towards that end: free service with unlimited users until April. We'll also build out your integration for you if you'd like us to. If you think this'd be helpful for your company, leave a message here or email me at ben@datanitro.com.
- zwieback 13y agoIs this basically a simpler way to do "Data|From Web" or "Data|From Other Sources" where the burden is on the developer instead of the user?
- karamazov 13y agoYes, that's one way to look at it. In practice most people send CSV's now, so it's a simpler, streamlined way to do that. A big advantage of Voyager over both of those options is the ability to send custom data per-user without building an ad-hoc web UI for it.
- zwieback 13y agoRight, per-user is a very useful feature. Given that 99% of the world's real work is done in Excel I think this could be a good product.
- andreash 13y agoI would like more use cases to see the full value. For a Ruby-dev, why should I use this paid service instead of Google Drive ruby-gem? https://github.com/gimite/google-drive-ruby https://github.com/gimite/google-drive-ruby or the nice excel gem https://github.com/cxn03651/writeexcel https://github.com/cxn03651/writeexcel ?
- vj44 13y agoAndreash - this product is designed specifically for Excel - as an end user, you can pull data from within Excel directly to your spreadsheet (which may already contain models, charts etc.), without having to shuffle around multiple files.
- mamcx 13y agoWhat is a "user" here?
- karamazov 13y agoA user is someone that you send data to (probably one of your customers or employees).