8 ms·

The world needs a better spreadsheet

179 points by mmonihan 10y ago

tmaly 10y ago
I agree, I automate generation of hundreds of spreadsheets a day. I would like to see more scripting/automation features on email.
- mmonihan 10y ago
  OP. I was actually thinking something similar. Do you mean the ability to send out emails with app data rather than code and orchestrate them yourself?
  - tmaly 10y ago
    I was thinking more on the processing of incoming emails, ones with attachments or routing. I worked years ago on an enterprise product that did this, but it was integrated with large printer.
    - iamwil 10y ago
      What data was being sent back and forth? Why did you need to process the attachments?
abraae 10y ago
Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every customer was so receptive and excited, it was a fun and job and easy sell. But later, we learnt that those customers were in fact the early adopters, and Lotus never did manage to cross the chasm with that product. Later Microsoft produced Excel and..well the rest is history. My conclusion: the world doesn't need a better spreadsheet. Existing spreadsheet technologies are good enough for the hokey, half-baked things that people like to build with them.
- ghaff 10y ago
  As I very vaguely recall the initial iteration(s) of the Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 weren't great. The real killer though was probably Microsoft's bundling into Microsoft Office. That cemented the use of the entire suite of Microsoft products even when, at a given point in time, they may not have been best in category. As I recall, Lotus made some purchases to try to follow the same strategy but it was too late by then. There were also the attempts at fully integrated products like Symphony and Framework (Ashton Tate) but the loose coupling really won the mass market.
  - bboreham 10y ago
    Lotus went straight to OS/2, because Windows was a toy. Oops. Around 1991 they had an all-new cross-platform super-product under development, but it crashed and burned and they had to plough on with 123. I did a lot of the low-level GUI coding for the Open Look and Motif versions of 123. Fun times.
    - spitfire 10y ago
      Would that be Lotus Improv? I used Improv and Quantrix on NeXTStep. Quantrix on OSX is still a secret weapon of mine.
      - bboreham 10y ago
        I don't think so. They all had code-names - 123 for Windows was Rockport; Improv was Back Bay and the one I'm talking about was another place, but the exact name escapes me. I believe Improv was written in Objective-C while the one I mean was in C++.
        slededit 10y ago
        C++ is impressive for 1991. Excel was still K&R C at that time.
- i_don_t_know 10y ago
Avshalom 10y ago
While I'm not entirely sure if "the world needs a better spreadsheet" is a stand in for "accessible prototyping tools" it's worth noting that things like Quantrix Modeler and DADiSP are the better spreadsheets it's just that no one uses them because Excel (and by extension Excel work-alikes) have path dependency on their side.
- infinite8s 10y ago
  And those products are thousands of dollars a year while Excel comes bundled with every mass market computer.
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Yeah, fair enough, that too. I happen to think "paying for good tools" is a good thing but as a student/stockboy: A thousand dollars is a fucking lot of dollars, especially if your business is still running on debt.
canadian_voter 10y ago
Perhaps, In the end, the best piece of software is the one you never had to build in the first place. -- The Article Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? -- SICP I think the real uncanny valley here lies in maintaining software, not designing it. Business needs change over time and software must adapt. I think the best option is to build your own software. Understand it top to bottom and make it do exactly what you need to do. Sadly this is not possible for most people. The next best option, however, is not to spend $3,000 on something written over a weekend that won't be supported down the road. The best option is to go with the Salesforce solution. My first programming gig (in high school) was automating a process that involved manipulating index cards and doing some basic math. I also trained them on how to operate, maintain and extend the system. The end result worked fine for a few years, until it was eventually replaced with some elaborate proprietary system that cost about as much every 3 months as the whole system I delivered. But that system came with ongoing support that obviated the need for any in-house expertise. So they felt the additional expense was worthwhile. And I was happy not to have to take the support calls. Edit: And ultimately both systems were more accurate and saved time over the manual process.
- mmonihan 10y ago
  OP. This is a great point. The activation cost for you to respond to support calls is probably more than the company would be willing to pay you. Which is why SaaS businesses with support teams that benefit from scale are the de facto model for these businesses. I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests. I get a ton of requests related to lists of collections within the app, which could be maintained by the users themselves.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests. Yes, and it's called Salesforce (or Dynamics if you like more pain than Salesforce already causes). I have better things to do than write a full front-to-back webapp to organize garbage scattered around in spreadsheets, so it's been a lifesaver since I can create a new object or field in a couple clicks (and if I need to write some custom UI or backend code I still have the option to do so).
chowes 10y ago
I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps. The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce. That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.
- mmonihan 10y ago
  OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while. I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc. What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility. However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API. I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.
  - chowes 10y ago
    Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users. That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :) Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks. I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.
markoutso 10y ago
I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company. It's not even good marketing.
- mmonihan 10y ago
  OP. Thank you. I spit out my soda laughing reading this.
- chrismealy 10y ago
  This is the best comment of all time.
- noddingham 10y ago
  Agreed. I'm not sure exactly what I read, but I couldn't piece together a single coherent line of thought as we jumped from sketchy individual developers to requirements gathering, something about UX, valleys, zombies, Salesforce as a CRM (except it can do anything really 'cause it's a platform), to the closing statement about perhaps not building the application you thought you needed. And what did it all have to do with spreadsheets, or building a better one?
- wott 10y ago
  > this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The first line says it is a transcript from a talk, so you shouldn't expect literature.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  Agreed this article is lacking a real thread. Re spreadsheets, I am one of those dreaded 'advanced Excel' people and some of the comments i hear about spreadsheet limitations are a bit like saying 'this chisel is a rubbish hammer'. Our main use is to take small amounts of data from our ERP and browse/sum/subtotal it in some way for adhoc analysis or sharing, or keep the record of some minor detail over time. I have seen thousands of lower skilled users use spreadsheets in this way and there is no better tool. Indeed accountants often run much more complex stuff, but tend to be very dilligent with their inputs and versioning and have little trouble. As soon as you have concurrent users a spreadsheet becomes a bad database substitute.
niftich 10y ago
Spreadsheets are the poor man's data processing pipeline; they ship with a wealth of numeric and data munging functions and give you an easy-to-understand visual representation of your datastore. You can use them to crunch numbers and graph, but also to implement fairly complex business logic, and they accomplish this within the confines of an application you probably have already bought anyway. They're the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit you need to survive adversity in the SMB space. Spreadsheets don't succeed outside of pure numerical calculations because they're that good, they succeed because they're versatile and ubiquitous, and everyone already has Excel or Google Sheets. If everyone already had, say, Sharepoint, or even some drag-and-drop no-cost rapid application generator that requires zero sysadmin skills to run, that would be the new baseline.
- snarf21 10y ago
  I agree. The problem is also that most people who are running SMB aren't experts at growing their data model. Over time, the owner needs new objects (rows, columns, sheets, etc.) and new things that need calculated and tracked BUT they also need to associate these new things to the old things. They are not going to be able to renormalize the data model (they don't know they have). They make new sheets or Excel files and do the best they can. It is flexible and can do whatever they want but that doesn't make it more efficient. I don't think that most of these people need new or custom software. They need someone to come in once a year and help them re-optimize their processes against the new reality. Excel might be enough but there has to be an investment in making that an efficient tool.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    Sounds like someone should come in and turn that into a database that feeds excel.
richardboegli 10y ago
It exists already. It's called MS Access.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Except Access has many of the same issues as Excel. You can work around some of the nastier stuff like file locking by using liked database files and having everyone save their own copy of the "frontend" database file, but it's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth (and oh god is it slooow).
- orionblastar 10y ago
  I think you mean MS SQL Server, it is faster and has more features than Access. Access is good to prototype a database and use GUI/UX controls to make forms and other stuff. It is good for small projects, but once you need to upscale you need to go to SQL Server. I did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s migrated databases from Excel and Access to SQL Server. On Linux, people use MySQL or PostgreSQL for the same reason and upgrade from SQLlite3 etc.
- r00fus 10y ago
  <shudder> how many paths to mdb corruption? Let me count the ways. I wrote Access apps in college for cash to doctors and small business and I still have no love for the tool.
hbbio 10y ago
"The world needs a better spreadsheet" I read this when I was a teen (as that's long ago). It was at a time Lotus was going to launch Improv in 1993! Improv was the attempt made by a very smart team at Lotus to reconquer the crowd that went to Excel. But as you can guess, the great product never found its market (or never grew beyond a niche) and was killed a few years later. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
- n00b101 10y ago
  It's worth noting that Quantrix Modeler [1] (founded in 2002) did carry on the torch after Lotus Improv, and continues to exist. That said, it's not clear how much traction Quantrix got either. It was bought out in 2010 by IDBS and te deal value wasn't disclosed, but it was reported that they had only nine employees at the time of acquisition. Another very interesting earlier attempt in this market was Javelin [2]. [1] https://www.quantrix.com/ https://www.quantrix.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software
funkdified 10y ago
Airtable is a better spreadsheet imho.
- postscapes1 10y ago
  +1 on Airtable, it's the only app I have used in the past 5 years that fits great into workflows and allows me to peer into and sort the data based on the task / view I need.
smarx007 10y ago
Quip (a better spreadsheet) or Django web framework (its ORM and built-in admin can do wonders) are worth mentioning. Another example that comes to mind is how Vox uses Google Sheets for content & config: https://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-at-the-code-that-powered-the-verge-50 https://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-a...
ianamartin 10y ago
I swear to god, anytime anything pops up on a website when I click on it, it seriously pisses me off. A fucking chatbox? I already hate your company. A fucking chatbox from the author of a blog? I hate you and everything you stand for. You are what's wrong with the internet. You should know better, and you do. But you do this anyway. Just stop.
- jeeyoungk 10y ago
  I stopped reading when the chatbox obscured the screen also. I'm confused on what the author is trying to achieve.
  - loqwe 10y ago
    apparently the spreadsheet the world needs is really a chat app.
- mmonihan 10y ago
  OP. Yea, that was interesting on my end using chat. I probably would hate that on your end as much you did. I did have some pretty fun conversations though. I removed it, because that got exhausting.
  - david927 10y ago
    I, for one, really liked it. And thanks for the chat, Matt!
choward 10y ago
What's with that garbage at the bottom right? I'm trying to read your article. Why would I want to talk to you before reading your article? Made me stop reading.
giardini 10y ago
Not really. Most spreadsheets(~88%) have errors. "Sorry, Your Spreadsheet Has Errors (Almost 90% Do)" https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/09/how-to-reduce-spreadsheet-errors.html https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/09/how-to-reduce-spread... The 2008 source article is "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors" http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm
- wffurr 10y ago
  If you read the blog, you'd see that the system he's suggesting is somewhat more robust than a spreadsheet. His example at the end is the Google Forms builder, which at least does a modicum of input validation, unlike your typical direct-entry spreadsheet. And the point is not to completely dismiss the idea with a glib soundbite like that, but to actually take seriously building tools like spreadsheets that allow non-technical users to build data-driven systems.
wheelerwj 10y ago
how do people get a "hey HN" welcome line up on their site so quickly? This was posted here less than 2 hours ago. Do people really monitor incoming referrals hourly?
- detaro 10y ago
  It was posted by the creator, that makes it quite easy ;)
- blhack 10y ago
  I mean...yes? Back when I had a dedicated office, there was a screen that was tail -f on various logfiles watching website traffic. My sites were all personal projects, so the traffic was low enough that I could notice an uptick in traffic visually. Also things like google analytics etc.
- Geee 10y ago
  I think most folks do it automatically, e.g. Hey { referer }, ... I was surprised the text was still there in incognito mode.
- zaroth 10y ago
  There must be an app to notify you of HN/Reddit/Tweets that mention your domain?
balls187 10y ago
Charged a close friend $3,000 for a few days worth of work?
- crooked-v 10y ago
  $100 x 8 x 3 = $2400, and that's for just 8 hours a day with a pretty gentle contracting rate.
  - balls187 10y ago
    $100 per hour for a Rails crud app? For a close friend?
- hackuser 10y ago
  Close friend lowballed you on three days of work?
  - balls187 10y ago
    I make more than enough money from my day job, such that I don't need to nickle and dime my close friends.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dendory 10y ago
Being part of design meetings, it's amazing how many endless customizations and workflow adjustments people like project managers and consultants like to request for a new piece of software. But when it comes down to it, most users don't want a complex, hard to understand interface that has so many features it's supposed to improve everyone's productivity. Most people want to use their spreadsheet, their Outlook calendar and their IE browser. Not because it's best at the task, but because that's what they know and are used to.
- loqwe 10y ago
  > most users don't wan ... so many features mmm. which features do you want? and you over there, which features to do you want. and you, in the corner? It adds up, doesn't it!
- bottled_poe 10y ago
  Of course users don't want anything complex, and if the resulting custom software makes a task more confusing and error-prone than a spreadsheet, the developers and designers have failed. Instead, I read this comment as meaning a few different things: 1. It is difficult to get users to try something different. 2. Most users don't comprehend the limitations of the software with which they are already familiar.
conservajerk 10y ago
Fundamentally software development is about writing and managing complex systems. Excel and the like have limited capability to manage complexity and any simple system built with excel eventually turns to bad smelling unmaintainable chaos. So then people build tools that manage complexity better but are still "easy to use". And then those tools become so complex that software developers are the only people who understand how to use them. And then what's the difference between said tool and writing real code? After 10-20 years we are back to where we started. I wonder exactly how many times I will see this in my career?
robohamburger 10y ago
Once you get all the security, backups, data validation and whatever exporting/search capability the people need a system like this is never simple. I wonder how happy they really were with his software vs relieved to have a semi-functioning system. It still seems like something like this is in the realm of possible. Salesforce mostly does this, but its UI is garbage and most people end up hiring implementors for it.
tyingq 10y ago
Quickbase does an amazing job with allowing non-tech users to create their own crud apps, and the model is very spreadsheet like, including grid edit if you want. The trouble is the pricing model. $25/user per month for the edition that's not hobbled. For some use cases, that makes sense. For others, it's just way too high.
meredydd 10y ago
I'm seeing a lot of hate for spreadsheets here. First, to state the obvious: in the time your least-favourite Excel sheet took to grow from simple time-saver to sprawling Cthuloid monster, it has probably saved multiple person-years of effort. You could spend the next six months rebuilding it all "properly", and it's still comically positive ROI. Spreadsheets are also a unique, top-level category in computing as a whole. By my count, there have only ever been three schemes of interaction with computers (with any significant adoption): 1. Shrink-wrap. Use the software you've been given. Read the manual; that's what it does, no more. 2. Programming language. It's text, it's got syntax, it's got the same basic constructs as any other programming language. You know they're all the same, because once you know a few languages, you can start using a new one in an hour or two. 3. Spreadsheets. Visual interaction, scaling smoothly from "simple calculator" to "this is the backbone of our whole business". Spreadsheets really are that fundamental a discovery in the field of computing. Give them some love.
- meredydd 10y ago
  Aside: This is also why the OP's wishes for "a better spreadsheet" so often run into trouble. If you take a spreadsheet and naively "add more power" with a programming language, you're producing an abrupt transition from mode #3 to mode #2. This spooks the user almost as much as learning to code from scratch - and for the same reasons. I don't have an answer for this. For https://anvil.works https://anvil.works we deliberately avoided this pitfall by never pretending to be a spreadsheet (or, for that matter, shrinkwrap, like Salesforce does). We make you write code from step 1, and get comfy with it, because if you started in any other paradigm it would be too hard to switch. And if you don't write code, you'll never get much advantage over just using Access.
- goatlover 10y ago
  But why not word processors or presentation software (PowerPoint)? How about Photoshop? That's pretty big. Edit: oh, you're not computing something so much as you're using shrink wrapped software to build documents, presentations, or manipulate images. So, not quite the same. As for programming languages, I disagree. You don't go from only knowing say Python, PHP and Java to being able to use Haskell in a few hours. There's a substantial learning curve in being able to use a sufficiently different programming language. And no, "Hello, World" or typing in a few simple commands from a tutorial don't count. Do you suppose the a C programmer is just going to be building a meaningful Smalltalk or Lisp program after a couple of hours? Or that a Javascript programmer is going to be whipping up C++ applications in that amount of time?
joelbondurant 10y ago
Sharpie on Kleenex, a far superior data format to spreadsheets.
jon49 10y ago
I built an app in Excel 5 years ago. It was a heat map for events, for stadiums, theaters, etc. I would build the static CSS/HTML and write out the files from Excel. It is still in use today. After having stopped working on it for a couple of years a minor bug was brought up to me recently. Luckily I had a windows computer again with Excel installed. Excel is a great platform for building prototype apps, or even long lived apps - especially 10 years ago. It is amazing the power that Excel has. But, a proper app should be built in JavaScript with a solid back end (F# being my fave). Although developing in Excel was a bit clunky it was amazingly easy to get beautiful customer interfaces and beautiful forms.

179 points by mmonihan 10y ago

tmaly 10y ago

I agree, I automate generation of hundreds of spreadsheets a day. I would like to see more scripting/automation features on email.

mmonihan 10y ago
OP. I was actually thinking something similar. Do you mean the ability to send out emails with app data rather than code and orchestrate them yourself?
- tmaly 10y ago
  I was thinking more on the processing of incoming emails, ones with attachments or routing. I worked years ago on an enterprise product that did this, but it was integrated with large printer.
  - iamwil 10y ago
    What data was being sent back and forth? Why did you need to process the attachments?

abraae 10y ago

Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every customer was so receptive and excited, it was a fun and job and easy sell. But later, we learnt that those customers were in fact the early adopters, and Lotus never did manage to cross the chasm with that product. Later Microsoft produced Excel and..well the rest is history. My conclusion: the world doesn't need a better spreadsheet. Existing spreadsheet technologies are good enough for the hokey, half-baked things that people like to build with them.

ghaff 10y ago
As I very vaguely recall the initial iteration(s) of the Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 weren't great. The real killer though was probably Microsoft's bundling into Microsoft Office. That cemented the use of the entire suite of Microsoft products even when, at a given point in time, they may not have been best in category. As I recall, Lotus made some purchases to try to follow the same strategy but it was too late by then. There were also the attempts at fully integrated products like Symphony and Framework (Ashton Tate) but the loose coupling really won the mass market.
- bboreham 10y ago
  Lotus went straight to OS/2, because Windows was a toy. Oops. Around 1991 they had an all-new cross-platform super-product under development, but it crashed and burned and they had to plough on with 123. I did a lot of the low-level GUI coding for the Open Look and Motif versions of 123. Fun times.
  - spitfire 10y ago
    Would that be Lotus Improv? I used Improv and Quantrix on NeXTStep. Quantrix on OSX is still a secret weapon of mine.
    - bboreham 10y ago
      I don't think so. They all had code-names - 123 for Windows was Rockport; Improv was Back Bay and the one I'm talking about was another place, but the exact name escapes me. I believe Improv was written in Objective-C while the one I mean was in C++.
      - slededit 10y ago
        C++ is impressive for 1991. Excel was still K&R C at that time.
i_don_t_know 10y ago

Avshalom 10y ago

While I'm not entirely sure if "the world needs a better spreadsheet" is a stand in for "accessible prototyping tools" it's worth noting that things like Quantrix Modeler and DADiSP are the better spreadsheets it's just that no one uses them because Excel (and by extension Excel work-alikes) have path dependency on their side.

infinite8s 10y ago
And those products are thousands of dollars a year while Excel comes bundled with every mass market computer.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  Yeah, fair enough, that too. I happen to think "paying for good tools" is a good thing but as a student/stockboy: A thousand dollars is a fucking lot of dollars, especially if your business is still running on debt.

canadian_voter 10y ago

Perhaps, In the end, the best piece of software is the one you never had to build in the first place. -- The Article Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? -- SICP I think the real uncanny valley here lies in maintaining software, not designing it. Business needs change over time and software must adapt. I think the best option is to build your own software. Understand it top to bottom and make it do exactly what you need to do. Sadly this is not possible for most people. The next best option, however, is not to spend $3,000 on something written over a weekend that won't be supported down the road. The best option is to go with the Salesforce solution. My first programming gig (in high school) was automating a process that involved manipulating index cards and doing some basic math. I also trained them on how to operate, maintain and extend the system. The end result worked fine for a few years, until it was eventually replaced with some elaborate proprietary system that cost about as much every 3 months as the whole system I delivered. But that system came with ongoing support that obviated the need for any in-house expertise. So they felt the additional expense was worthwhile. And I was happy not to have to take the support calls. Edit: And ultimately both systems were more accurate and saved time over the manual process.

mmonihan 10y ago
OP. This is a great point. The activation cost for you to respond to support calls is probably more than the company would be willing to pay you. Which is why SaaS businesses with support teams that benefit from scale are the de facto model for these businesses. I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests. I get a ton of requests related to lists of collections within the app, which could be maintained by the users themselves.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests. Yes, and it's called Salesforce (or Dynamics if you like more pain than Salesforce already causes). I have better things to do than write a full front-to-back webapp to organize garbage scattered around in spreadsheets, so it's been a lifesaver since I can create a new object or field in a couple clicks (and if I need to write some custom UI or backend code I still have the option to do so).

chowes 10y ago

I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps. The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce. That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.

mmonihan 10y ago
OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while. I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc. What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility. However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API. I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.
- chowes 10y ago
  Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users. That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :) Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks. I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.

markoutso 10y ago

I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company. It's not even good marketing.

mmonihan 10y ago
OP. Thank you. I spit out my soda laughing reading this.
chrismealy 10y ago
This is the best comment of all time.
noddingham 10y ago
Agreed. I'm not sure exactly what I read, but I couldn't piece together a single coherent line of thought as we jumped from sketchy individual developers to requirements gathering, something about UX, valleys, zombies, Salesforce as a CRM (except it can do anything really 'cause it's a platform), to the closing statement about perhaps not building the application you thought you needed. And what did it all have to do with spreadsheets, or building a better one?
wott 10y ago
> this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The first line says it is a transcript from a talk, so you shouldn't expect literature.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jimnotgym 10y ago
Agreed this article is lacking a real thread. Re spreadsheets, I am one of those dreaded 'advanced Excel' people and some of the comments i hear about spreadsheet limitations are a bit like saying 'this chisel is a rubbish hammer'. Our main use is to take small amounts of data from our ERP and browse/sum/subtotal it in some way for adhoc analysis or sharing, or keep the record of some minor detail over time. I have seen thousands of lower skilled users use spreadsheets in this way and there is no better tool. Indeed accountants often run much more complex stuff, but tend to be very dilligent with their inputs and versioning and have little trouble. As soon as you have concurrent users a spreadsheet becomes a bad database substitute.

niftich 10y ago

Spreadsheets are the poor man's data processing pipeline; they ship with a wealth of numeric and data munging functions and give you an easy-to-understand visual representation of your datastore. You can use them to crunch numbers and graph, but also to implement fairly complex business logic, and they accomplish this within the confines of an application you probably have already bought anyway. They're the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit you need to survive adversity in the SMB space. Spreadsheets don't succeed outside of pure numerical calculations because they're that good, they succeed because they're versatile and ubiquitous, and everyone already has Excel or Google Sheets. If everyone already had, say, Sharepoint, or even some drag-and-drop no-cost rapid application generator that requires zero sysadmin skills to run, that would be the new baseline.

snarf21 10y ago
I agree. The problem is also that most people who are running SMB aren't experts at growing their data model. Over time, the owner needs new objects (rows, columns, sheets, etc.) and new things that need calculated and tracked BUT they also need to associate these new things to the old things. They are not going to be able to renormalize the data model (they don't know they have). They make new sheets or Excel files and do the best they can. It is flexible and can do whatever they want but that doesn't make it more efficient. I don't think that most of these people need new or custom software. They need someone to come in once a year and help them re-optimize their processes against the new reality. Excel might be enough but there has to be an investment in making that an efficient tool.
- goatlover 10y ago
  Sounds like someone should come in and turn that into a database that feeds excel.

richardboegli 10y ago

It exists already. It's called MS Access.

snuxoll 10y ago
Except Access has many of the same issues as Excel. You can work around some of the nastier stuff like file locking by using liked database files and having everyone save their own copy of the "frontend" database file, but it's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth (and oh god is it slooow).
orionblastar 10y ago
I think you mean MS SQL Server, it is faster and has more features than Access. Access is good to prototype a database and use GUI/UX controls to make forms and other stuff. It is good for small projects, but once you need to upscale you need to go to SQL Server. I did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s migrated databases from Excel and Access to SQL Server. On Linux, people use MySQL or PostgreSQL for the same reason and upgrade from SQLlite3 etc.
r00fus 10y ago
<shudder> how many paths to mdb corruption? Let me count the ways. I wrote Access apps in college for cash to doctors and small business and I still have no love for the tool.

hbbio 10y ago

"The world needs a better spreadsheet" I read this when I was a teen (as that's long ago). It was at a time Lotus was going to launch Improv in 1993! Improv was the attempt made by a very smart team at Lotus to reconquer the crowd that went to Excel. But as you can guess, the great product never found its market (or never grew beyond a niche) and was killed a few years later. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

n00b101 10y ago
It's worth noting that Quantrix Modeler [1] (founded in 2002) did carry on the torch after Lotus Improv, and continues to exist. That said, it's not clear how much traction Quantrix got either. It was bought out in 2010 by IDBS and te deal value wasn't disclosed, but it was reported that they had only nine employees at the time of acquisition. Another very interesting earlier attempt in this market was Javelin [2]. [1] https://www.quantrix.com/ https://www.quantrix.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software

funkdified 10y ago

Airtable is a better spreadsheet imho.

postscapes1 10y ago
+1 on Airtable, it's the only app I have used in the past 5 years that fits great into workflows and allows me to peer into and sort the data based on the task / view I need.

smarx007 10y ago

Quip (a better spreadsheet) or Django web framework (its ORM and built-in admin can do wonders) are worth mentioning. Another example that comes to mind is how Vox uses Google Sheets for content & config: https://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-at-the-code-that-powered-the-verge-50 https://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-a...

ianamartin 10y ago

I swear to god, anytime anything pops up on a website when I click on it, it seriously pisses me off. A fucking chatbox? I already hate your company. A fucking chatbox from the author of a blog? I hate you and everything you stand for. You are what's wrong with the internet. You should know better, and you do. But you do this anyway. Just stop.

jeeyoungk 10y ago
I stopped reading when the chatbox obscured the screen also. I'm confused on what the author is trying to achieve.
- loqwe 10y ago
  apparently the spreadsheet the world needs is really a chat app.
mmonihan 10y ago
OP. Yea, that was interesting on my end using chat. I probably would hate that on your end as much you did. I did have some pretty fun conversations though. I removed it, because that got exhausting.
- david927 10y ago
  I, for one, really liked it. And thanks for the chat, Matt!

choward 10y ago

What's with that garbage at the bottom right? I'm trying to read your article. Why would I want to talk to you before reading your article? Made me stop reading.

giardini 10y ago

Not really. Most spreadsheets(~88%) have errors. "Sorry, Your Spreadsheet Has Errors (Almost 90% Do)" https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/09/how-to-reduce-spreadsheet-errors.html https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/09/how-to-reduce-spread... The 2008 source article is "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors" http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

wffurr 10y ago
If you read the blog, you'd see that the system he's suggesting is somewhat more robust than a spreadsheet. His example at the end is the Google Forms builder, which at least does a modicum of input validation, unlike your typical direct-entry spreadsheet. And the point is not to completely dismiss the idea with a glib soundbite like that, but to actually take seriously building tools like spreadsheets that allow non-technical users to build data-driven systems.

wheelerwj 10y ago

how do people get a "hey HN" welcome line up on their site so quickly? This was posted here less than 2 hours ago. Do people really monitor incoming referrals hourly?

detaro 10y ago
It was posted by the creator, that makes it quite easy ;)
blhack 10y ago
I mean...yes? Back when I had a dedicated office, there was a screen that was tail -f on various logfiles watching website traffic. My sites were all personal projects, so the traffic was low enough that I could notice an uptick in traffic visually. Also things like google analytics etc.
Geee 10y ago
I think most folks do it automatically, e.g. Hey { referer }, ... I was surprised the text was still there in incognito mode.
zaroth 10y ago
There must be an app to notify you of HN/Reddit/Tweets that mention your domain?

balls187 10y ago

Charged a close friend $3,000 for a few days worth of work?

crooked-v 10y ago
$100 x 8 x 3 = $2400, and that's for just 8 hours a day with a pretty gentle contracting rate.
- balls187 10y ago
  $100 per hour for a Rails crud app? For a close friend?
hackuser 10y ago
Close friend lowballed you on three days of work?
- balls187 10y ago
  I make more than enough money from my day job, such that I don't need to nickle and dime my close friends.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dendory 10y ago

Being part of design meetings, it's amazing how many endless customizations and workflow adjustments people like project managers and consultants like to request for a new piece of software. But when it comes down to it, most users don't want a complex, hard to understand interface that has so many features it's supposed to improve everyone's productivity. Most people want to use their spreadsheet, their Outlook calendar and their IE browser. Not because it's best at the task, but because that's what they know and are used to.

loqwe 10y ago
> most users don't wan ... so many features mmm. which features do you want? and you over there, which features to do you want. and you, in the corner? It adds up, doesn't it!
bottled_poe 10y ago
Of course users don't want anything complex, and if the resulting custom software makes a task more confusing and error-prone than a spreadsheet, the developers and designers have failed. Instead, I read this comment as meaning a few different things: 1. It is difficult to get users to try something different. 2. Most users don't comprehend the limitations of the software with which they are already familiar.

conservajerk 10y ago

Fundamentally software development is about writing and managing complex systems. Excel and the like have limited capability to manage complexity and any simple system built with excel eventually turns to bad smelling unmaintainable chaos. So then people build tools that manage complexity better but are still "easy to use". And then those tools become so complex that software developers are the only people who understand how to use them. And then what's the difference between said tool and writing real code? After 10-20 years we are back to where we started. I wonder exactly how many times I will see this in my career?

robohamburger 10y ago

Once you get all the security, backups, data validation and whatever exporting/search capability the people need a system like this is never simple. I wonder how happy they really were with his software vs relieved to have a semi-functioning system. It still seems like something like this is in the realm of possible. Salesforce mostly does this, but its UI is garbage and most people end up hiring implementors for it.

tyingq 10y ago

Quickbase does an amazing job with allowing non-tech users to create their own crud apps, and the model is very spreadsheet like, including grid edit if you want. The trouble is the pricing model. $25/user per month for the edition that's not hobbled. For some use cases, that makes sense. For others, it's just way too high.

meredydd 10y ago

I'm seeing a lot of hate for spreadsheets here. First, to state the obvious: in the time your least-favourite Excel sheet took to grow from simple time-saver to sprawling Cthuloid monster, it has probably saved multiple person-years of effort. You could spend the next six months rebuilding it all "properly", and it's still comically positive ROI. Spreadsheets are also a unique, top-level category in computing as a whole. By my count, there have only ever been three schemes of interaction with computers (with any significant adoption): 1. Shrink-wrap. Use the software you've been given. Read the manual; that's what it does, no more. 2. Programming language. It's text, it's got syntax, it's got the same basic constructs as any other programming language. You know they're all the same, because once you know a few languages, you can start using a new one in an hour or two. 3. Spreadsheets. Visual interaction, scaling smoothly from "simple calculator" to "this is the backbone of our whole business". Spreadsheets really are that fundamental a discovery in the field of computing. Give them some love.

meredydd 10y ago
Aside: This is also why the OP's wishes for "a better spreadsheet" so often run into trouble. If you take a spreadsheet and naively "add more power" with a programming language, you're producing an abrupt transition from mode #3 to mode #2. This spooks the user almost as much as learning to code from scratch - and for the same reasons. I don't have an answer for this. For https://anvil.works https://anvil.works we deliberately avoided this pitfall by never pretending to be a spreadsheet (or, for that matter, shrinkwrap, like Salesforce does). We make you write code from step 1, and get comfy with it, because if you started in any other paradigm it would be too hard to switch. And if you don't write code, you'll never get much advantage over just using Access.
goatlover 10y ago
But why not word processors or presentation software (PowerPoint)? How about Photoshop? That's pretty big. Edit: oh, you're not computing something so much as you're using shrink wrapped software to build documents, presentations, or manipulate images. So, not quite the same. As for programming languages, I disagree. You don't go from only knowing say Python, PHP and Java to being able to use Haskell in a few hours. There's a substantial learning curve in being able to use a sufficiently different programming language. And no, "Hello, World" or typing in a few simple commands from a tutorial don't count. Do you suppose the a C programmer is just going to be building a meaningful Smalltalk or Lisp program after a couple of hours? Or that a Javascript programmer is going to be whipping up C++ applications in that amount of time?

joelbondurant 10y ago

Sharpie on Kleenex, a far superior data format to spreadsheets.

jon49 10y ago

I built an app in Excel 5 years ago. It was a heat map for events, for stadiums, theaters, etc. I would build the static CSS/HTML and write out the files from Excel. It is still in use today. After having stopped working on it for a couple of years a minor bug was brought up to me recently. Luckily I had a windows computer again with Excel installed. Excel is a great platform for building prototype apps, or even long lived apps - especially 10 years ago. It is amazing the power that Excel has. But, a proper app should be built in JavaScript with a solid back end (F# being my fave). Although developing in Excel was a bit clunky it was amazingly easy to get beautiful customer interfaces and beautiful forms.