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I'll just relay my thoughts. It's a bit sour, but me and Excel we go way back. Perhaps you can find something in it: 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted cor

by wjnc 11y ago

I'll just relay my thoughts. It's a bit sour, but me and Excel we go way back. Perhaps you can find something in it: 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. 2. It looks pretty useful and would help users create a bit more structure in their sheets and calculations. 3. My idea of why terrible Excelsheets seem to be the norm, is that 'build once-use once' does not exist in business. Too often your boss wants you to redo your calculation and after a few iterations, time not spent documenting / cleaning catches up with you in Excel. Often you also build one workflow and apply it to many not-quite the same situations. Tweak a few cells here and there. Hence custom workflows per worksheet and again, broken (re-)usability. Your tool would help to start with a more long term perspective, and help in iterating on a sheet. Might even be faster to type, than to click-point and type. But my baseline response would be near number 1. Plugins from Excel to R and Python exist too, but still all the sheets I see internally, and code even professional consultants come pitching is in VBA or some proprietary format. The Venn-diagram between programming and Excel has no overlap imho.

kohanz 11y ago
> 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. What other tools are available? A lot of technical people don't choose Excel, but come into situations where Excel has been relied upon historically and the non-technical people do not want to move away from it. So I could see such a plugin having value in these situations (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin), which I would imagine are quite common (I have been in this situation before). > Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. Fact or opinion?
- wjnc 11y ago
  >> 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. > What other tools are available? A lot of technical people don't choose Excel, but come into situations where Excel has been relied upon historically and the non-technical people do not want to move away from it. So I could see such a plugin having value in these situations (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin), which I would imagine are quite common (I have been in this situation before). In my enviroment (slow finance, seen a few firms, second line hence the reviewing of many a workhorse). The IT-department is pretty Microsoft-captured. The quants are pretty much do-as-they-want (Java, .NET, VBA). Whatever they know and can get their hands on. Then the financials in accounting. Excel is king there and is pretty much the workhorse surrounding the customer, financial and management accounting systems. My main point here is that I have yet to find a firm where the use of tools is not historic, and where those totally different skillsets / user sets work together on tooling. The use case you describe (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin) fails for me (or rather: is an exceptional situation), since the big value of Excel is that the non-technical persons builds his own model. I know of one bank that has started working with teams with explicitly different skillsets (so IT, business and finance always in one team). In that case, tooling like this would rock. >> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. >Fact or opinion? I would say this is a fact. It's the theme that's pretty common that B2B-sales is a different park than B2C-sales. B2B-sales in larger firms goes via a sourcing department, that possibly has preferred suppliers, etc. So just being a cool tool, still gets you installed on 0 corporate pc's that are basicly in lockdown.
- zhte415 11y ago
  >> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. >Fact or opinion? Users definitely buy plugins, but these bring significant functionality and often tie-in to additional services. Financial data being the most familiar to me. These plugins, while wrapped in VBA, are often in C++ (again, finance world) for robustness and performance, and try to be as agnostic to whatever nutty layout or logic a user chooses to have for their spreadsheet. So, agree, with the pragmatic assertion that technical people love Excel as a UI, but they're probably not necessarily developer-technical (could be, given the richness of Excel plugins can have on some platforms), but technical in another field and Excel is an easily hackable UI for what they really want to do, which is mainly, as the OP suggests, using Excel to change stuff and do what-ifs, which spreadsheets were designed to do (as if, to close the circle).
damian_r 11y ago
Thanks for your insights. I am happy to hear that you see potential in the project. I have a gut feeling that there is a lot of analysts who use Excel for difficult and heavy computations and who don't want to learn programming but would love to structure their formulas in a more decent manner. > Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. I don't agree - take a look at https://www.think-cell.com/en/ https://www.think-cell.com/en/ they are a company providing add-ins used by big four. They have 350 000 users in 7500+ companies with a revenue of ~50-70 millions of euro per year. > The Venn-diagram between programming and Excel has no overlap imho I believe the overlap exists. IMO it's possible to teach Excel users some basic practices from programming (like code review, testing etc). We (I have a company with my friends) actually have created a project that allowed a company write formulas in a simple file which generated a fully functional webapp. They used version control and code review together with unit tests. This allowed analysts build a solution using their knowledge without the need to have programming skills. This is a different approach programming Formulas -> Web application, but I believe an approach programming Formulas -> Excel is also possible.
- wjnc 11y ago
  Funny you mention Thinkcell. Thinkcell is exactly the only smallish-supplier package I have ever seen as an allowed plugin to Excel. It entered the firm I was then working via people coming from consultancies and wanting to make graphs only Thinkcell can build. Bloomberg is the only other plugin I have seen, and Bloomberg is on another level. My point (while I wrote "don't buy" and "no overlap") of course being somewhat less strong. Even with "hardly ever buy" and "hardly any overlap", the sales of even a strong product is hard and needs thought up front. You can build this tool and build it well and then struggle hard on the B2B-sales.
  - damian_r 11y ago
    Ok, now I see what you meant by "don't buy". I agree it's tough to sell such product to a big company (actually selling any product to enterprise without credibility - a lot of users or big users - is very tough). IMO if you are small and you want to succeed in selling such product you need to make smaller companies love your product first and then talk to the big guys. On the other hand I have spoken to Marcus (CEO and cofounder of Think-cell) about how they started and their product went viral quite fast and was used by one of the big four companies even at the early stage. I believe that if you hit the spot and build something that has a huge urgency in the market then even big fence in front of enterprise is not going to be your problem. Having said this, I agree that selling this product could be tough. It's not just adding value but it changes the way people work - and enterprise hates changes. The more time big company has to sacrifice to change employees habits, the harder it is for them to decide to buy the product even if it adds value long term.

by wjnc 11y ago

kohanz 11y ago

> 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. What other tools are available? A lot of technical people don't choose Excel, but come into situations where Excel has been relied upon historically and the non-technical people do not want to move away from it. So I could see such a plugin having value in these situations (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin), which I would imagine are quite common (I have been in this situation before). > Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. Fact or opinion?

wjnc 11y ago
>> 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer. > What other tools are available? A lot of technical people don't choose Excel, but come into situations where Excel has been relied upon historically and the non-technical people do not want to move away from it. So I could see such a plugin having value in these situations (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin), which I would imagine are quite common (I have been in this situation before). In my enviroment (slow finance, seen a few firms, second line hence the reviewing of many a workhorse). The IT-department is pretty Microsoft-captured. The quants are pretty much do-as-they-want (Java, .NET, VBA). Whatever they know and can get their hands on. Then the financials in accounting. Excel is king there and is pretty much the workhorse surrounding the customer, financial and management accounting systems. My main point here is that I have yet to find a firm where the use of tools is not historic, and where those totally different skillsets / user sets work together on tooling. The use case you describe (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin) fails for me (or rather: is an exceptional situation), since the big value of Excel is that the non-technical persons builds his own model. I know of one bank that has started working with teams with explicitly different skillsets (so IT, business and finance always in one team). In that case, tooling like this would rock. >> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. >Fact or opinion? I would say this is a fact. It's the theme that's pretty common that B2B-sales is a different park than B2C-sales. B2B-sales in larger firms goes via a sourcing department, that possibly has preferred suppliers, etc. So just being a cool tool, still gets you installed on 0 corporate pc's that are basicly in lockdown.
zhte415 11y ago
>> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. >Fact or opinion? Users definitely buy plugins, but these bring significant functionality and often tie-in to additional services. Financial data being the most familiar to me. These plugins, while wrapped in VBA, are often in C++ (again, finance world) for robustness and performance, and try to be as agnostic to whatever nutty layout or logic a user chooses to have for their spreadsheet. So, agree, with the pragmatic assertion that technical people love Excel as a UI, but they're probably not necessarily developer-technical (could be, given the richness of Excel plugins can have on some platforms), but technical in another field and Excel is an easily hackable UI for what they really want to do, which is mainly, as the OP suggests, using Excel to change stuff and do what-ifs, which spreadsheets were designed to do (as if, to close the circle).

damian_r 11y ago

Thanks for your insights. I am happy to hear that you see potential in the project. I have a gut feeling that there is a lot of analysts who use Excel for difficult and heavy computations and who don't want to learn programming but would love to structure their formulas in a more decent manner. > Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc. I don't agree - take a look at https://www.think-cell.com/en/ https://www.think-cell.com/en/ they are a company providing add-ins used by big four. They have 350 000 users in 7500+ companies with a revenue of ~50-70 millions of euro per year. > The Venn-diagram between programming and Excel has no overlap imho I believe the overlap exists. IMO it's possible to teach Excel users some basic practices from programming (like code review, testing etc). We (I have a company with my friends) actually have created a project that allowed a company write formulas in a simple file which generated a fully functional webapp. They used version control and code review together with unit tests. This allowed analysts build a solution using their knowledge without the need to have programming skills. This is a different approach programming Formulas -> Web application, but I believe an approach programming Formulas -> Excel is also possible.

wjnc 11y ago
Funny you mention Thinkcell. Thinkcell is exactly the only smallish-supplier package I have ever seen as an allowed plugin to Excel. It entered the firm I was then working via people coming from consultancies and wanting to make graphs only Thinkcell can build. Bloomberg is the only other plugin I have seen, and Bloomberg is on another level. My point (while I wrote "don't buy" and "no overlap") of course being somewhat less strong. Even with "hardly ever buy" and "hardly any overlap", the sales of even a strong product is hard and needs thought up front. You can build this tool and build it well and then struggle hard on the B2B-sales.
- damian_r 11y ago
  Ok, now I see what you meant by "don't buy". I agree it's tough to sell such product to a big company (actually selling any product to enterprise without credibility - a lot of users or big users - is very tough). IMO if you are small and you want to succeed in selling such product you need to make smaller companies love your product first and then talk to the big guys. On the other hand I have spoken to Marcus (CEO and cofounder of Think-cell) about how they started and their product went viral quite fast and was used by one of the big four companies even at the early stage. I believe that if you hit the spot and build something that has a huge urgency in the market then even big fence in front of enterprise is not going to be your problem. Having said this, I agree that selling this product could be tough. It's not just adding value but it changes the way people work - and enterprise hates changes. The more time big company has to sacrifice to change employees habits, the harder it is for them to decide to buy the product even if it adds value long term.