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Blockspring: Do anything in a spreadsheet

170 points by robzyb 11y ago

state 11y ago
This is such an interesting angle on making technical tools more accessible. I can't say I have a use for including functions in spreadsheets — but when I imagine where this could go it's exciting.
minimaxir 11y ago
The "Suddenly any financial analyst in your company, given the right permissions" comment is telling. The companies that would be most likely to use a service like Blockspring would be the types of companies that would never be willing to give and trust data access and processing to a random third party. The Privacy policy does not help alleviate these concerns (tl;dr: we keep everything). It is also unclear if the business offering (https://www.blockspring.com/business https://www.blockspring.com/business ) offers self-hosting. Case in point, one of the example scripts in the blog post (https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-by-product-id https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-b... ) requires you to input a Amazon Product Access Key and a Amazon Product Secret Key as parameters.
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  These are not normal parameters, they are "Secrets", a special kind of parameters that are saved internally in Blockspring and automatically applied to functions that use them, after the account owner has set them.
- lmg643 11y ago
  I recently discovered the joys of ExcelDNA, which lets you do spreadsheet extensions using C#. One of the first things I did was spin up a plugin that allows users to request data elements from CSV files hosted on a server, essentially a giant remote VLOOKUP. The product uses TCP/IP so it can run anywhere - client self-hosted, or remote over the internet. Throughput was pretty high - 70k elements per second over a network. This, and I'm a novice programmer. So I look at Blockspring, and my first thought is that I don't quite get it, although if they ran on proprietary, internal data sources, it would make sense. (Do people really download Amazon listings into Excel? I suppose). Or, if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases, then you'd get masses of high quality data to analyze. In terms of the core "into excel" functionality - maybe I am understating my novice capabilities, but ever since I discovered ExcelDNA it seems like you can do almost anything with Excel and C#.
  - barretts 11y ago
    > if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases this exists. bloomberg has a plug-in that lets you pull much of its data directly into excel using normal-looking formulas. the catch is you have to pay $20,000/year.
normloman 11y ago
No no no. People at my company already use spreadsheets where they don't belong (in the place of databases, note taking apps, regular expressions, and one time someone tried to do page layout with it). The last thing we need is for these bozos to program with it. I see the need for an intermediate entryway into programming (Hypercard), just don't tack it on to an already bloated program like excel.
- eykanal 11y ago
  That was exactly my first thought as well. The LAST thing any company needs is more excel sheets—unprotected, easily lost, bloated, no-backup excel sheets. Leaving alone the observation that, in many companies, the rank-and-file don't even know how to insert a new row in a spreadsheet, let alone muck with functions..
  - normloman 11y ago
    It's the ones that know the functions that you have to worry about. Especially finance people. Excel is the software they are most comfortable in, and they never want to leave it. My boss just made our company events calendar in excel. Why not do this in a calendar program? Because he can do it faster in excel.
    - the_af 11y ago
      If he can do it faster in excel, isn't that a good enough reason? If the problem is that the spreadsheet later becomes an unworkable mess, isn't that an argument you can use to convince him to use other tools? And if he remains unconvinced... maybe excel was right for him after all?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        That's a very good reason. I perfectly understand not willing to learn yet another fancy tool that looks nice, but is unfinished, buggy and will probably be gone next year. Some people are too busy doing actual business to waste time on that. The biggest benefit of Excel is its flexibility - you can do what you need, how you need, and you can adjust and readjust your sheets on the fly to match the changing and messy needs of doing business. That database you're trying to force those workers to use? It's probably designed wrong the moment you save the schema, because the needs changed. So Excel is unsecure and people keep losing their spreadsheets by moving them between each other on flash drives? Solve that. Maybe with a Dropbox-like solution for syncing documents (no shiny webapp bullshit, no logging in to domain NAT Samba Kerberos Windows Briefcase Sharepoint nonsense, just "a folder that syncs" and enforces some security). I have the feeling that a lot of problems between IT and non-tech workers stems from the former treating latter like morons instead of trying to help them to do their jobs efficiently.
serve_yay 11y ago
You learn to code that way or you learn to code this way, either way you're gonna pay the piper.
- drumdance 11y ago
  I started learning to code via spreadsheets (anyone remember Borland Quattro Pro?!)
Dwolb 11y ago
I think this concept has far reaching effects on optimizing white collar operations if you're able create social features based on the data. I'd want to know who else in the company is using this data? Who has used it on the past? Have they done work that is similar or even a duplication of the work I'm doing? These information management issues are currently hidden, but result in lost productivity. Just this past month my friend at Google found out another person had already done his analysis and he could learn from the previous work. Just knowing someone had previously used the same dataset could have saved him 7 weeks of work.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > Just knowing someone had previously used the same dataset could have saved him 7 weeks of work. Information about data is not black-and-white in the corporate world. Even in the same company, internal data is usually on a need-to-know basis, with necessary NDAs. A service that tells you who else is using the data would defeat the purpose. As an extreme example, what would happen if a service allowed data-sociality with HIPPA-protected data? Not good things.
  - rjurney 11y ago
    I don't think open access lists for HIPAA data would be a bad thing. Why do you? In fact, it sounds like a great idea. Shine some light on who is accessing what data.
    - dublinben 11y ago
      The fact that a certain specialist has accessed a patient's records would reveal something about their health. Even the frequency of general access conveys information about your health.
      - rjurney 11y ago
        I'm thinking more internally, non-doctor users.
  - 11y ago
bliti 11y ago
How much does this cost to use? I was not able to find a pricing page on their website.
- bfstein 11y ago
  $7/user/month for team of $50/user/month for enterprise (extra admin support and training). https://open.blockspring.com/organization/setup https://open.blockspring.com/organization/setup
sanowski 11y ago
https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy User Content. We collect your personal information contained in any User Content you create, share, store, or submit to or through the Service, which may include photo or other image files, written comments, information, data, text, scripts, graphics, code, and other interactive features generated, provided, or otherwise made accessible to you and other Users by Blockspring via the Service in accordance with your personal settings.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisClark 11y ago
  Sounds right. They need permission to display your files back to you, or to others if you want them to.
Havoc 11y ago
I doubt anyone with hardcore spreadsheet data would trust a third party plugins. My employer rolls most software (incl Excel plugins) in-house for that exact reason - can't let outsiders near the data.
anotherangrydev 11y ago
>What is your exit strategy? >Acquisition by Google.
- bpodgursky 11y ago
  Please don't quote unless it's an actual quote.
  - anotherangrydev 11y ago
    >Please don't quote unless it's an actual quote. - bpodgursky
phantom_oracle 11y ago
A nice hack for someone who wants to use this tool (granted that it is free for non-corporate customers): If you are a data-scientist and would like to extract public-data from 1 of the APIs they provide, you can use this tool, pull that data (take it in raw form) and then export as both a spreadsheet and as CSV. You can then use the CSV with your data-analysis toolset (Python probably has support), and voila! You've saved yourself the headache of wrangling APIs. Apart from that, I'm going to go with the opinion of the other comments made that you probably don't want to be putting your private Excel info on another acquisition-driven startup.
gnrlist 11y ago
So they made PowerQuery that you have to pay for?
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  You don't need PowerQuery when you can have full SQL inside Excel, and in a very elegant way: http://thingiequery.com/ http://thingiequery.com/
- anonfunction 11y ago
  I'm not familiar with PowerQuery but after a quick search I think a huge difference is that blockspring has an open marketplace of data APIs.
harryh 11y ago
You've been able to do this in Google Sheets for years with a tiny bit of JS programming.
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  I tried, and it is impossible. Google Apps Script is awfully slow and limited.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
onion2k 11y ago
This is pretty awesome, and it's exactly the sort of product that makes me wonder if the "in the future everyone will need to code" predictions are going to pan out. With better tools that can 'intelligently' help a non-coder[1] use APIs and algorithms, the coding bit of coding becomes somewhat redundant. We'll still need the problem solving and analytics skills, and some of the organisation but actually sitting and typing in syntax could well vanish. It's feasible that a suitably easy to use programming language would make coding so trivial it actually stops being a 'skill', in the same way that wordprocessors and printers have made copy typists redundant. [1] As a caveat to that I would also argue that a competent Excel user actually is a coder, just with a higher level macro language than most other developers, but still.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 11y ago
  This gets me thinking. I wonder if why spreadsheets become something like programming-lite is that it allows for rapid prototyping and iterating. This because the user can manipulate the content of variables directly, and watch the result change as they do. This then allows them to test smaller parts of the logic before aiming the result at another piece of logic and thus building a larger structure piece by piece. The problem with using spreadsheets for this is that as you move stuff around the logic parts break. So what if we had something like a variable grid and a logic sheet? So that any variable read or written was up in a grid like that of a spreadsheet, for easy reference and manipulation, while the logic was of somewhere else. Thus moving things around to make room for more logic didn't influence the variables etc. And to take a step back, i wonder if this ease of prototyping was one of the things that made micro-computers so potent. This because they booted directly into a Basic interpreter (prototyping), while at the same time there was no persistent storage you could screw up with crap code (just flick the power and get back to it).
  - notduncansmith 11y ago
    I think flow-based programming was supposed to be something like that. As spreadsheets show us, we haven't really figured out how to scale this approach to more complex applications.
anonfunction 11y ago
https://open.blockspring.com/browse https://open.blockspring.com/browse For anyone who wants to view the actual blockspring UI/UX along with what APIs are available. I personally prefer seeing the product rather than reading marketing materials. In many cases (not specific to blockspring) they're completely different in terms of design, messaging and stated features.
- anonfunction 11y ago
  As an early user of blockspring I was excited to login and add another one of my APIs (bitcoin related) that would be perfect for having in spreadsheets. Unfortunately I couldn't find any obvious way to add an API. Naturally I hacked it by going to one of my existing APIs (thanks google, I couldn't find a URL from the UI otherwise) and cloning it. Here's the UI of the create API page[1] for anyone who's interested. [1] http://i.imgur.com/wQoyhT1.png http://i.imgur.com/wQoyhT1.png Edit: You can create new APIs on blockspring by going directly to a route[2] which still works. I saw Alexa had an API but it needed authentication credentials, and since I already had found Alexa's undocumented API[3] I added it to blockspring[4] just for fun. [2] https://open.blockspring.com/blocks/new https://open.blockspring.com/blocks/new [3] http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&url=news.ycombinator.com http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&url=news.ycombinator.com [4] https://open.blockspring.com/montanaflynn/alexa-rank https://open.blockspring.com/montanaflynn/alexa-rank
  - orliesaurus 11y ago
    Wow great lenghts but in the footer you can just click "Create block" :)
dpweb 11y ago
Does everybody need to learn to code? One's health is pretty important to one's staying alive - not everyone learns to be a doctor. Finance and accounting is the lifeblood of a business, not everyone learns to be an accountant. Everyone can do it, you should - no you must - do it too. I think it devalues the profession.
- noblethrasher 11y ago
  "Everyone should learn to write, but not everyone should be a professional writer." But, it's not that we want "everyone to learn to code"; what we really want is for everyone to learn how to use computers to build powerful simulations so that they can test and explore interesting and complicated ideas. Certain issues, like climate change, become much more tractable to discuss once you start using Excel rather than Word.
- morsch 11y ago
  Basic skills in medicine and accounting are useful to have and sort of prevalent. I'm sure you put on a band-aid before. Basic skills in automating certain computer tasks seem to be valuable to many people -- almost all office workers, I'd wager. I don't see how that devalues the profession. There's a huge difference between what people can achieve using stuff like this and what I do every day. Maybe basic skills in stuff like this will even translate to a better appreciation of what professional developers do. A guy can dream...
  - vacri 11y ago
    When it comes to programming, 'putting on a band-aid' is analagous to 'entering user/pass credentials'. Yes, everyone can put on a band-aid, just like everyone can log on to something. Neither take skill or understanding, and both are 'just things you do'. On a tangent, a great many people have positively woeful understanding of biology. I think biology should be a mandatory subject in high school. After all, the one thing that absolutely every human has and uses throughout their entire life is their body; that can't be said of pretty much any other high school subject.
fiatjaf 11y ago
I don't think "anything" is a good term. Its good use cases are only of read-only data. Reading (and preprocessing) data from your services/databases inside a spreadsheet is quite awesome.
curiousjorge 11y ago
Can you explain the tech behind this? How do you go about building an excel and google docs plug-in with custom formulas?
- orliesaurus 11y ago
  A good starting point: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/quickstart/docs https://developers.google.com/apps-script/quickstart/docs
  - curiousjorge 11y ago
    what about for excel?
spinlock 11y ago
How does this differ from building plugins? Excel already has a programming interface and I'm pretty sure you can script Sheets with python. Is it just easier?
spinlock 11y ago
How does this differ from building plugins? Excel already has a programming interface and I'm pretty sure you can script Sheets with python. Is it just easier?
tarr11 11y ago
Feels narrow and I don't see the payout. "They just need an easier on-ramp to their internal database to do things like comparing projected revenue to actual revenue in order to close out this month’s financials." This is a small gap. On one side, you have people copy-pasting CSV files into excel and doing it one-off. On the other side, you have specialized SaaS products for business workflows. (Wouldn't you rather just use some accounting software to run your companies financials, rather than muck around in Excel?) In the middle, you have people writing either code or Excel Macros to automate some of this. Looks like BlockSpring is meant to automate that group away. Just having spent 3 minutes with blockspring, there's friction. (Log into this service, fiddle with the parameters, clean up data, remove mess, etc) I can see the IFTTT / Zapier comparisons but this is a lot more work and far less reward. Those tools give immediate results. At the end of my integration with Blockspring, I'm left with a table of data that I STILL have to analyze in Excel.
- sjg007 11y ago
  Huge market.. e.g. look at Domo. Same idea.
- sjg007 11y ago
  Huge market.. e.g. look at Domo. Same idea.
mizzao 11y ago
Goldman Sachs already has a lot of financial and internal data available in spreadsheet plugins via Slang, and it's generally very useful for financial models (at least when I was there). This just seems like a way to generalize that for the masses and for other types of data.
kuni-toko-tachi 11y ago
I've yet to see a product that turns non software engineers into software engineers. These types of products only make salespeople commissions and then sit unused. Crystal Reports is a prime example. I've seen it sold many times to people at companies who buy into the notion that software engineers can be replaced by drag and drop tools. The people who buy into the sales pitch lack the desire or discipline to learn it. Software engineering is difficult work and requires patience, which is often lacking in people who think a half-assed design document written in MS Word is anywhere equivalent to writing bug free scalable code that needs to run 24/7.
le_clochard 11y ago
There was Resolver One, which apparently got acquired by PythonAnywhere, which allowed Python scripted spreadsheets. It was AWESOME when I tried it, but tad too slow and no takers in the office because spreadsheets get passed around and need to be verified/rerun by people who do not know any programming. Even VBA at times. Their OSS version is apparently still available at https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet (haven't tried it.)
Nate75Sanders 11y ago
The code in spreadsheets is always a 2nd-class or 3rd-class citizen. It makes it ridiculously hard to both test and review and there are essentially no good checks on what output you're getting from the input. I've worked in orgs where C-level execs without a technical background were writing crazy complicated spreadsheets and nobody had any idea how they worked or if they were correct. When you bury the code, you bury the necessary processes around the code. This is dangerous.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  Why is everyone hating on Excel, and spreadsheets in general? They are such easy tools for creating, displaying and auditing calculations (like financial models), manipulating rows of similar data, and generating regular charts and reports. Sure, their ease of use makes them popular with, and accessible to, people who don't think like we do. This doesn't mean they are bad tools for everyone. Python's duck typing may horrify Java programmers, but it doesn't mean that all Python code is bad or has type errors.
  - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
    > Why is everyone hating on Excel, and spreadsheets in general? Speaking for myself, because spreadsheets are intrinsically "information silos." Traditionally, this has been due to the data being locked up in the spreadsheet's proprietary files. This offering only exacerbates the issue by incorporating data from external sources which lack data management guarantees available in other solutions. > They are such easy tools for creating, displaying and auditing calculations (like financial models), manipulating rows of similar data, and generating regular charts and reports. When their use is restricted to this, spreadsheets do provide value. The problem is that many times the spreadsheets start off as a data integration scratch pad (as it were) and then become the "system of reference." Used as a tool which enables one-off types of value it's hard to argue against them (so I won't :-)). > Python's duck typing may horrify Java programmers, but it doesn't mean that all Python code is bad or has type errors. This is a false dichotomy[1], or a straw man[2] if you prefer, as both Python and Java are general purpose programming languages. Excel is not a general purpose programming language. It is not a programming language. It is a program which allows people to use a very specific DSL to benefit from it in novel ways. And when they do, any chance of autonomous integration is lost. 1 - http://www.philosophy-index.com/logic/fallacies/false-dilemma.php http://www.philosophy-index.com/logic/fallacies/false-dilemm... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

170 points by robzyb 11y ago

state 11y ago

This is such an interesting angle on making technical tools more accessible. I can't say I have a use for including functions in spreadsheets — but when I imagine where this could go it's exciting.

minimaxir 11y ago

The "Suddenly any financial analyst in your company, given the right permissions" comment is telling. The companies that would be most likely to use a service like Blockspring would be the types of companies that would never be willing to give and trust data access and processing to a random third party. The Privacy policy does not help alleviate these concerns (tl;dr: we keep everything). It is also unclear if the business offering (https://www.blockspring.com/business https://www.blockspring.com/business ) offers self-hosting. Case in point, one of the example scripts in the blog post (https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-by-product-id https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-b... ) requires you to input a Amazon Product Access Key and a Amazon Product Secret Key as parameters.

fiatjaf 11y ago
These are not normal parameters, they are "Secrets", a special kind of parameters that are saved internally in Blockspring and automatically applied to functions that use them, after the account owner has set them.
lmg643 11y ago
I recently discovered the joys of ExcelDNA, which lets you do spreadsheet extensions using C#. One of the first things I did was spin up a plugin that allows users to request data elements from CSV files hosted on a server, essentially a giant remote VLOOKUP. The product uses TCP/IP so it can run anywhere - client self-hosted, or remote over the internet. Throughput was pretty high - 70k elements per second over a network. This, and I'm a novice programmer. So I look at Blockspring, and my first thought is that I don't quite get it, although if they ran on proprietary, internal data sources, it would make sense. (Do people really download Amazon listings into Excel? I suppose). Or, if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases, then you'd get masses of high quality data to analyze. In terms of the core "into excel" functionality - maybe I am understating my novice capabilities, but ever since I discovered ExcelDNA it seems like you can do almost anything with Excel and C#.
- barretts 11y ago
  > if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases this exists. bloomberg has a plug-in that lets you pull much of its data directly into excel using normal-looking formulas. the catch is you have to pay $20,000/year.

normloman 11y ago

No no no. People at my company already use spreadsheets where they don't belong (in the place of databases, note taking apps, regular expressions, and one time someone tried to do page layout with it). The last thing we need is for these bozos to program with it. I see the need for an intermediate entryway into programming (Hypercard), just don't tack it on to an already bloated program like excel.

eykanal 11y ago
That was exactly my first thought as well. The LAST thing any company needs is more excel sheets—unprotected, easily lost, bloated, no-backup excel sheets. Leaving alone the observation that, in many companies, the rank-and-file don't even know how to insert a new row in a spreadsheet, let alone muck with functions..
- normloman 11y ago
  It's the ones that know the functions that you have to worry about. Especially finance people. Excel is the software they are most comfortable in, and they never want to leave it. My boss just made our company events calendar in excel. Why not do this in a calendar program? Because he can do it faster in excel.
  - the_af 11y ago
    If he can do it faster in excel, isn't that a good enough reason? If the problem is that the spreadsheet later becomes an unworkable mess, isn't that an argument you can use to convince him to use other tools? And if he remains unconvinced... maybe excel was right for him after all?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      That's a very good reason. I perfectly understand not willing to learn yet another fancy tool that looks nice, but is unfinished, buggy and will probably be gone next year. Some people are too busy doing actual business to waste time on that. The biggest benefit of Excel is its flexibility - you can do what you need, how you need, and you can adjust and readjust your sheets on the fly to match the changing and messy needs of doing business. That database you're trying to force those workers to use? It's probably designed wrong the moment you save the schema, because the needs changed. So Excel is unsecure and people keep losing their spreadsheets by moving them between each other on flash drives? Solve that. Maybe with a Dropbox-like solution for syncing documents (no shiny webapp bullshit, no logging in to domain NAT Samba Kerberos Windows Briefcase Sharepoint nonsense, just "a folder that syncs" and enforces some security). I have the feeling that a lot of problems between IT and non-tech workers stems from the former treating latter like morons instead of trying to help them to do their jobs efficiently.

serve_yay 11y ago

You learn to code that way or you learn to code this way, either way you're gonna pay the piper.

drumdance 11y ago
I started learning to code via spreadsheets (anyone remember Borland Quattro Pro?!)

Dwolb 11y ago

I think this concept has far reaching effects on optimizing white collar operations if you're able create social features based on the data. I'd want to know who else in the company is using this data? Who has used it on the past? Have they done work that is similar or even a duplication of the work I'm doing? These information management issues are currently hidden, but result in lost productivity. Just this past month my friend at Google found out another person had already done his analysis and he could learn from the previous work. Just knowing someone had previously used the same dataset could have saved him 7 weeks of work.

minimaxir 11y ago
> Just knowing someone had previously used the same dataset could have saved him 7 weeks of work. Information about data is not black-and-white in the corporate world. Even in the same company, internal data is usually on a need-to-know basis, with necessary NDAs. A service that tells you who else is using the data would defeat the purpose. As an extreme example, what would happen if a service allowed data-sociality with HIPPA-protected data? Not good things.
- rjurney 11y ago
  I don't think open access lists for HIPAA data would be a bad thing. Why do you? In fact, it sounds like a great idea. Shine some light on who is accessing what data.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    The fact that a certain specialist has accessed a patient's records would reveal something about their health. Even the frequency of general access conveys information about your health.
    - rjurney 11y ago
      I'm thinking more internally, non-doctor users.
- 11y ago

bliti 11y ago

How much does this cost to use? I was not able to find a pricing page on their website.

bfstein 11y ago
$7/user/month for team of $50/user/month for enterprise (extra admin support and training). https://open.blockspring.com/organization/setup https://open.blockspring.com/organization/setup

sanowski 11y ago

https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy User Content. We collect your personal information contained in any User Content you create, share, store, or submit to or through the Service, which may include photo or other image files, written comments, information, data, text, scripts, graphics, code, and other interactive features generated, provided, or otherwise made accessible to you and other Users by Blockspring via the Service in accordance with your personal settings.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ChrisClark 11y ago
Sounds right. They need permission to display your files back to you, or to others if you want them to.

Havoc 11y ago

I doubt anyone with hardcore spreadsheet data would trust a third party plugins. My employer rolls most software (incl Excel plugins) in-house for that exact reason - can't let outsiders near the data.

anotherangrydev 11y ago

>What is your exit strategy? >Acquisition by Google.

bpodgursky 11y ago
Please don't quote unless it's an actual quote.
- anotherangrydev 11y ago
  >Please don't quote unless it's an actual quote. - bpodgursky

phantom_oracle 11y ago

A nice hack for someone who wants to use this tool (granted that it is free for non-corporate customers): If you are a data-scientist and would like to extract public-data from 1 of the APIs they provide, you can use this tool, pull that data (take it in raw form) and then export as both a spreadsheet and as CSV. You can then use the CSV with your data-analysis toolset (Python probably has support), and voila! You've saved yourself the headache of wrangling APIs. Apart from that, I'm going to go with the opinion of the other comments made that you probably don't want to be putting your private Excel info on another acquisition-driven startup.

gnrlist 11y ago

So they made PowerQuery that you have to pay for?

fiatjaf 11y ago
You don't need PowerQuery when you can have full SQL inside Excel, and in a very elegant way: http://thingiequery.com/ http://thingiequery.com/
anonfunction 11y ago
I'm not familiar with PowerQuery but after a quick search I think a huge difference is that blockspring has an open marketplace of data APIs.

harryh 11y ago

You've been able to do this in Google Sheets for years with a tiny bit of JS programming.

fiatjaf 11y ago
I tried, and it is impossible. Google Apps Script is awfully slow and limited.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

onion2k 11y ago

This is pretty awesome, and it's exactly the sort of product that makes me wonder if the "in the future everyone will need to code" predictions are going to pan out. With better tools that can 'intelligently' help a non-coder[1] use APIs and algorithms, the coding bit of coding becomes somewhat redundant. We'll still need the problem solving and analytics skills, and some of the organisation but actually sitting and typing in syntax could well vanish. It's feasible that a suitably easy to use programming language would make coding so trivial it actually stops being a 'skill', in the same way that wordprocessors and printers have made copy typists redundant. [1] As a caveat to that I would also argue that a competent Excel user actually is a coder, just with a higher level macro language than most other developers, but still.

deleted 11y ago
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digi_owl 11y ago
This gets me thinking. I wonder if why spreadsheets become something like programming-lite is that it allows for rapid prototyping and iterating. This because the user can manipulate the content of variables directly, and watch the result change as they do. This then allows them to test smaller parts of the logic before aiming the result at another piece of logic and thus building a larger structure piece by piece. The problem with using spreadsheets for this is that as you move stuff around the logic parts break. So what if we had something like a variable grid and a logic sheet? So that any variable read or written was up in a grid like that of a spreadsheet, for easy reference and manipulation, while the logic was of somewhere else. Thus moving things around to make room for more logic didn't influence the variables etc. And to take a step back, i wonder if this ease of prototyping was one of the things that made micro-computers so potent. This because they booted directly into a Basic interpreter (prototyping), while at the same time there was no persistent storage you could screw up with crap code (just flick the power and get back to it).
- notduncansmith 11y ago
  I think flow-based programming was supposed to be something like that. As spreadsheets show us, we haven't really figured out how to scale this approach to more complex applications.

anonfunction 11y ago

https://open.blockspring.com/browse https://open.blockspring.com/browse For anyone who wants to view the actual blockspring UI/UX along with what APIs are available. I personally prefer seeing the product rather than reading marketing materials. In many cases (not specific to blockspring) they're completely different in terms of design, messaging and stated features.

anonfunction 11y ago
As an early user of blockspring I was excited to login and add another one of my APIs (bitcoin related) that would be perfect for having in spreadsheets. Unfortunately I couldn't find any obvious way to add an API. Naturally I hacked it by going to one of my existing APIs (thanks google, I couldn't find a URL from the UI otherwise) and cloning it. Here's the UI of the create API page[1] for anyone who's interested. [1] http://i.imgur.com/wQoyhT1.png http://i.imgur.com/wQoyhT1.png Edit: You can create new APIs on blockspring by going directly to a route[2] which still works. I saw Alexa had an API but it needed authentication credentials, and since I already had found Alexa's undocumented API[3] I added it to blockspring[4] just for fun. [2] https://open.blockspring.com/blocks/new https://open.blockspring.com/blocks/new [3] http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&url=news.ycombinator.com http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&url=news.ycombinator.com [4] https://open.blockspring.com/montanaflynn/alexa-rank https://open.blockspring.com/montanaflynn/alexa-rank
- orliesaurus 11y ago
  Wow great lenghts but in the footer you can just click "Create block" :)

dpweb 11y ago

Does everybody need to learn to code? One's health is pretty important to one's staying alive - not everyone learns to be a doctor. Finance and accounting is the lifeblood of a business, not everyone learns to be an accountant. Everyone can do it, you should - no you must - do it too. I think it devalues the profession.

noblethrasher 11y ago
"Everyone should learn to write, but not everyone should be a professional writer." But, it's not that we want "everyone to learn to code"; what we really want is for everyone to learn how to use computers to build powerful simulations so that they can test and explore interesting and complicated ideas. Certain issues, like climate change, become much more tractable to discuss once you start using Excel rather than Word.
morsch 11y ago
Basic skills in medicine and accounting are useful to have and sort of prevalent. I'm sure you put on a band-aid before. Basic skills in automating certain computer tasks seem to be valuable to many people -- almost all office workers, I'd wager. I don't see how that devalues the profession. There's a huge difference between what people can achieve using stuff like this and what I do every day. Maybe basic skills in stuff like this will even translate to a better appreciation of what professional developers do. A guy can dream...
- vacri 11y ago
  When it comes to programming, 'putting on a band-aid' is analagous to 'entering user/pass credentials'. Yes, everyone can put on a band-aid, just like everyone can log on to something. Neither take skill or understanding, and both are 'just things you do'. On a tangent, a great many people have positively woeful understanding of biology. I think biology should be a mandatory subject in high school. After all, the one thing that absolutely every human has and uses throughout their entire life is their body; that can't be said of pretty much any other high school subject.

fiatjaf 11y ago

I don't think "anything" is a good term. Its good use cases are only of read-only data. Reading (and preprocessing) data from your services/databases inside a spreadsheet is quite awesome.

curiousjorge 11y ago

Can you explain the tech behind this? How do you go about building an excel and google docs plug-in with custom formulas?

orliesaurus 11y ago
A good starting point: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/quickstart/docs https://developers.google.com/apps-script/quickstart/docs
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  what about for excel?

spinlock 11y ago

How does this differ from building plugins? Excel already has a programming interface and I'm pretty sure you can script Sheets with python. Is it just easier?

spinlock 11y ago

How does this differ from building plugins? Excel already has a programming interface and I'm pretty sure you can script Sheets with python. Is it just easier?

tarr11 11y ago

Feels narrow and I don't see the payout. "They just need an easier on-ramp to their internal database to do things like comparing projected revenue to actual revenue in order to close out this month’s financials." This is a small gap. On one side, you have people copy-pasting CSV files into excel and doing it one-off. On the other side, you have specialized SaaS products for business workflows. (Wouldn't you rather just use some accounting software to run your companies financials, rather than muck around in Excel?) In the middle, you have people writing either code or Excel Macros to automate some of this. Looks like BlockSpring is meant to automate that group away. Just having spent 3 minutes with blockspring, there's friction. (Log into this service, fiddle with the parameters, clean up data, remove mess, etc) I can see the IFTTT / Zapier comparisons but this is a lot more work and far less reward. Those tools give immediate results. At the end of my integration with Blockspring, I'm left with a table of data that I STILL have to analyze in Excel.

sjg007 11y ago
Huge market.. e.g. look at Domo. Same idea.
sjg007 11y ago
Huge market.. e.g. look at Domo. Same idea.

mizzao 11y ago

Goldman Sachs already has a lot of financial and internal data available in spreadsheet plugins via Slang, and it's generally very useful for financial models (at least when I was there). This just seems like a way to generalize that for the masses and for other types of data.

kuni-toko-tachi 11y ago

I've yet to see a product that turns non software engineers into software engineers. These types of products only make salespeople commissions and then sit unused. Crystal Reports is a prime example. I've seen it sold many times to people at companies who buy into the notion that software engineers can be replaced by drag and drop tools. The people who buy into the sales pitch lack the desire or discipline to learn it. Software engineering is difficult work and requires patience, which is often lacking in people who think a half-assed design document written in MS Word is anywhere equivalent to writing bug free scalable code that needs to run 24/7.

le_clochard 11y ago

There was Resolver One, which apparently got acquired by PythonAnywhere, which allowed Python scripted spreadsheets. It was AWESOME when I tried it, but tad too slow and no takers in the office because spreadsheets get passed around and need to be verified/rerun by people who do not know any programming. Even VBA at times. Their OSS version is apparently still available at https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet (haven't tried it.)

Nate75Sanders 11y ago

The code in spreadsheets is always a 2nd-class or 3rd-class citizen. It makes it ridiculously hard to both test and review and there are essentially no good checks on what output you're getting from the input. I've worked in orgs where C-level execs without a technical background were writing crazy complicated spreadsheets and nobody had any idea how they worked or if they were correct. When you bury the code, you bury the necessary processes around the code. This is dangerous.

rahimnathwani 11y ago
Why is everyone hating on Excel, and spreadsheets in general? They are such easy tools for creating, displaying and auditing calculations (like financial models), manipulating rows of similar data, and generating regular charts and reports. Sure, their ease of use makes them popular with, and accessible to, people who don't think like we do. This doesn't mean they are bad tools for everyone. Python's duck typing may horrify Java programmers, but it doesn't mean that all Python code is bad or has type errors.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  > Why is everyone hating on Excel, and spreadsheets in general? Speaking for myself, because spreadsheets are intrinsically "information silos." Traditionally, this has been due to the data being locked up in the spreadsheet's proprietary files. This offering only exacerbates the issue by incorporating data from external sources which lack data management guarantees available in other solutions. > They are such easy tools for creating, displaying and auditing calculations (like financial models), manipulating rows of similar data, and generating regular charts and reports. When their use is restricted to this, spreadsheets do provide value. The problem is that many times the spreadsheets start off as a data integration scratch pad (as it were) and then become the "system of reference." Used as a tool which enables one-off types of value it's hard to argue against them (so I won't :-)). > Python's duck typing may horrify Java programmers, but it doesn't mean that all Python code is bad or has type errors. This is a false dichotomy[1], or a straw man[2] if you prefer, as both Python and Java are general purpose programming languages. Excel is not a general purpose programming language. It is not a programming language. It is a program which allows people to use a very specific DSL to benefit from it in novel ways. And when they do, any chance of autonomous integration is lost. 1 - http://www.philosophy-index.com/logic/fallacies/false-dilemma.php http://www.philosophy-index.com/logic/fallacies/false-dilemm... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy