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I'm guessing I'm simply not considering the target audience, but so far as I know the groups (people who communicate primarily via spreadsheets) and (people who

by eykanal 12y ago

I'm guessing I'm simply not considering the target audience, but so far as I know the groups (people who communicate primarily via spreadsheets) and (people who know what an API is) have a fairly small overlap. Maybe I'm just underestimating how widely used spreadsheets are for communicating programming information. I've never seen it, but hey, I've never seen a lot of things.

garysieling 12y ago
Excel 2010 and up have the ability to read from web services that support Microsoft's OData protocol, and Microsoft is pushing some add-ons they built for Excel to turn it into a more robust front-end for business intelligence things. So I don't think it's about knowing Excel and knowing what an API is as much as that you can train someone to paste a URL in and then they can build their own reports/worksheets that join in your data.
swannvichot 12y ago
Actually, the Google Spreadsheet wrapper on APISpark (http://apispark.com http://apispark.com) is one of our most popular features!
samcrawford 12y ago
I can only speak for my use case, but I've heard similar things from other people, so I don't believe it's only me. I agree the overlap is small between those groups, but I think it's pretty painful when it does occur. I've done quite a bit of freelance web development, mostly in the telecoms and infrastructure sectors, and there was often a requirement to integrate with a third party. This "integration" almost always took the form of periodically receiving spreadsheets from them, manually importing them into our database, and then also handling the periodic updates. And the apps I was building only needed to query a few rows each day! Sometimes they'd eventually create an API, but most said they couldn't or wouldn't due to time or complexity. Sheetlabs is my attempt at removing some of these barriers. Anyway, that was _my_ itch, and this is how I'm scratching it!
ams6110 12y ago
Pretty much what I wanted to say. The target seems to be "business" people who email spreadsheets around, and if you haven't seen this much, believe me it is done a LOT. But in my experience these people would have no idea what an API is and no idea why they would want one. I see these people gravitating to shared spreadsheets on Google Drive or SkyDrive, which eliminates the email attachment pain without really requiring them to learn anything new. The idea is cool, the website looks good, and this seems like it could be really useful, but I don't get the sense that the right audience is targeted here. Also an aside to the Sheetlabs folks, sort of a pet peeve of mine, your site returns a blank white page if JavaScript is disabled, you might want to at least throw a noscript tag in so people don't think you are just down.

by eykanal 12y ago

garysieling 12y ago

Excel 2010 and up have the ability to read from web services that support Microsoft's OData protocol, and Microsoft is pushing some add-ons they built for Excel to turn it into a more robust front-end for business intelligence things. So I don't think it's about knowing Excel and knowing what an API is as much as that you can train someone to paste a URL in and then they can build their own reports/worksheets that join in your data.

swannvichot 12y ago

Actually, the Google Spreadsheet wrapper on APISpark (http://apispark.com http://apispark.com) is one of our most popular features!

samcrawford 12y ago

I can only speak for my use case, but I've heard similar things from other people, so I don't believe it's only me. I agree the overlap is small between those groups, but I think it's pretty painful when it does occur. I've done quite a bit of freelance web development, mostly in the telecoms and infrastructure sectors, and there was often a requirement to integrate with a third party. This "integration" almost always took the form of periodically receiving spreadsheets from them, manually importing them into our database, and then also handling the periodic updates. And the apps I was building only needed to query a few rows each day! Sometimes they'd eventually create an API, but most said they couldn't or wouldn't due to time or complexity. Sheetlabs is my attempt at removing some of these barriers. Anyway, that was _my_ itch, and this is how I'm scratching it!

ams6110 12y ago

Pretty much what I wanted to say. The target seems to be "business" people who email spreadsheets around, and if you haven't seen this much, believe me it is done a LOT. But in my experience these people would have no idea what an API is and no idea why they would want one. I see these people gravitating to shared spreadsheets on Google Drive or SkyDrive, which eliminates the email attachment pain without really requiring them to learn anything new. The idea is cool, the website looks good, and this seems like it could be really useful, but I don't get the sense that the right audience is targeted here. Also an aside to the Sheetlabs folks, sort of a pet peeve of mine, your site returns a blank white page if JavaScript is disabled, you might want to at least throw a noscript tag in so people don't think you are just down.