This looks sleek and well-made! However, this is a pretty crowded space. Spreadsheet Converter (https://www.spreadsheetconverter.com) and Spreadsheet Web (https://www.spreadsheetweb.com) are directly comparable and have been around for years. (Like Publisheet, Spreadsheet Converter offers an Excel add-in.)
When I started Publisheet, the idea was that it would allow users to create static, web-based reports from their spreadsheets, including textual information that would be written as Markdown (with a WYSIWYG editor) directly in one or more cells. I thought that it would be an easy way to create complete financial reports, for instance. The landing page's images still reflect that.
But as soon as it launched, I noticed that no one was using it for text-heavy reports. People just wanted to publish their spreadsheets online, as is, with formula support. So, I started focusing on that and ended up in this crowded space, as you correctly state.
I think that Publisheet's main selling point is that it's really simple to install and use. There's no .exe to install, there is no need to upload the Excel file in the browser, there is no form builder. Also, it works on Windows, Mac and in Excel Online. You basically click Publish and it's done. But I am aware that all the systems you listed are way more feature-complete than Publisheet and it is something we'll have to improve.
By the way, congrats on Calcapp, it looks really polished!
> including textual information that would be written as Markdown (with a WYSIWYG editor) directly in one or more cells. I thought that it would be an easy way to create complete financial reports, for instance. The landing page's images still reflect that.
> But as soon as it launched, I noticed that no one was using it for text-heavy reports.
I think the issue with that approach is that text-heavy reports don't perfectly overlap with the web. Speaking for basically all Wall St investment bankers out there, we spend our days generating reports from Excel into PowerPoint.
If something existed for Excel + PowerPoint that worked similarly to RMarkdown + Rstudio > PDF, I think it would be a game changer, even if only used to generate a few of the more "automated" reports.
There you go, free killer business idea for you ;-)
I'm not familiar with SlideShare, but from Wikipedia that seems to focus on sharing presentations rather than building them.
Here's what I mean, specifically: advisory work done by the big consulting companies and Wall Street M&A shops usually consists of lots and lots of Excel files being carefully massaged to create certain outputs that are then dropped in as images into PowerPoint with some text around them, mostly following the exact same formatting guidelines, which are then printed, bound and shown to clients.
Currently, you have to train people to not only know how to come up with the data (i.e. corporate finance, accounting, management consulting) but also teach them how to use powerpoint, think about formatting, make sure they memorize the right color palette, etc. Sometimes formatting alone is 50% of the work – your boss will always tell "you used the wrong shade of blue"...
A lot of these pages are the exact same across assignments. One example is a standard page with valuation multiples over time, comparing client company against a set of peers and/or the S&P500. Or a stock price performance chart.
Annoyingly, you have to set up pages manually virtually every time, and there's no separation between presentation and content.
With RMarkdown + RStudio, you can write Markdown code and embed images into your resulting PDF. Banking / Consulting is doing the same thing, except using PowerPoint. But PowerPoint is a slideshow app, not a PDF authoring tool.
My hypothesis: creating a PDF authoring tool that embeds data from Excel / other sources with formatting kept separate (think a separate CSS file) would be a game changer and revolutionize the industry (though admittedly Wall Street hates changes and convincing people to use this would be an uphill battle)
That's an interesting pivot! We originally set out to enable healthcare apps to be created easily by doctors and nurses (we even had very complete unit test support at one point, which is important to get e-health apps through the certification process). It turned out, though, that financial calculators and the like made up a much larger part of the market, leading us to where we are today. It sounds like your journey has been similar, but with a different starting point.
Best of luck with Publisheet, you're off to a good start!
Interesting pivot; thanks for sharing that context. Did you get a chance to interview some of your customers to learn more about why the report-based workflow wasn't interesting to them? While spreadsheets can be used for narratives, they aren't exactly the best medium for them because of their multi-dimensional nature.
Kudos to your product!
I would worry about competition. If there are already well established players, you have market share to steal from them (but I’m guessing you’re aware of that).
Are all these using a full excel calculation engine behind (like SpreadsheetGear or else)?
I always thought that if I had lots of spare time, a good project would be to take a spreadsheet, specify the input cells and output cells, analyse the logic of the formulas in between, and generate automatically some code that replicates this calculation and can be compiled.
That way you can preserve the logic in excel so a business user can own it, while getting all the performance and scalability of compiled code.
Shameless plug: we (https://sheetjs.com/) offer that as one of our paid builds. In conjunction with our JS parser https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx , you can modify cell values / formulae and recalculate the workbook (or individual expressions) in the web browser or nodejs
Through that library, they support a limited number of functions, which map more closely to the built-in Math object of JavaScript than to Excel.
We (Calcapp) have a custom-written compiler, which our server uses as a library for checking formulas and producing JavaScript code. In 2016, we changed our formula syntax to be largely compatible with what Excel and other spreadsheets use (https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2016/06/02/formula-syntax.html).
We support 281 formula functions, most of them compatible with what spreadsheets offer (https://www.calcapp.net/learn/functions.html). We have around a thousand unit tests verifying that we get the same results as Excel.
Thanks to our extensive function library, importing spreadsheets is often straight-forward (https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2017/06/14/convert.html). (We don't do a good job of supporting table look-ups, though, and we will soon turn our focus towards solving that problem.)
Our function library is released under the MIT license and is available on GitHub:
It is a fork of an existing library (formulajs) and includes a fair number of bug fixes and improvements.
At runtime, apps make use of a dependency graph generated by the compiler to ensure that calculations aren't run needlessly. As far as I'm aware, this is the same technique used by all spreadsheets.
It would be straightforward to analyze a workbook and build a dependency graph to determine inputs and outputs. From there, an app could be generated. The only issue is inferring the user interface -- labels often appear to the left of the input and output cells, and while this could be used as a heuristic, it wouldn't be perfect. I've toyed with the idea of using machine learning to do a better job of inferring a user interface.
Thanks, I see this behavior too. Interestingly enough, there's nothing on the page itself that can cause this behavior, this is all due to the sample calculator app embedded in an iframe element.
We use the HTML5 History API to ensure that we can go "back" in an app which is run as a standalone app on Android when the system back button is pressed -- and there really isn't another way to go about it. (Not having the system back button go back would lead to a pretty terrible user experience when calculators are run as standalone apps.) However, we'll want to disable this behavior whenever apps are embedded in web pages -- I'll have a look at this later tonight.
Do any of these enable a drop dead simple web api to access the spreadsheet?
For example, simple urls that could GET the data for a sheet, a row, selected area, etc. This could even be useful for non-developers.
Last time I checked MS made made oauth part of accessing sheets in excel, which seems to add too much addiotnal complexity. It seems like a no auth option would be useful, and even for protected spreadsheets the experience could be much less complex.
This is amazing, but there is no way that my firm will send any excels with our data to a relatively small and unknown third-party provider who will host it on a public URL. Are you thinking about allowing users to run this on-site?
This is a valid concern that people have shared with me before. It isn't in my immediate plans yet but depending on more feedback, we might offer an on-site solution in the future.
I'm surprised MS Office development seems to have just...stopped.
Powerpoint can't import an SVG (it turns it into a low res raster image). Powerpoint can't export SVG either, if I want to use a Powerpoint diagram in a web page. I opened a JSON file in Excel expecting to see nested values and nope, it doesn't support that file format. Office isn't even available in the Windows app store.
When Microsoft's going full steam ahead with stuff like Terminal, VSCode, OneDrive, Edgium, etc Office seems to be stuck in 2005.
Has it stopped, or are you maybe not the target/average user?
Most Office users have no idea what SVG or JSON files are or why they'd use them.
My experience is that Office has prioritized usability and automating tedious tasks, like theming, creating charts, and linking data back and forth.
Every major version over the last 15 years has made some large usability improvements (e.g. format painter), but perhaps you'd only notice them if you're using the applications in certain ways. I've noticed them and feel like I'm stuck in molasses whenever I have to use an older version of Office.
Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad.
When you format the number format of the axis of a chart, you now need two steps, adding the new numberformat to a list instead of applying it directly, it serves no purpose.
When you open a spreadsheet programatically it now opens in the background of the current sheet so you have to manually look up for it instead of opening at the front as before.
When you want to save to file it is now a two steps process, where you have to select filesystem as opposed to cloud stuff then you can save. I don't use MSFT's cloud services, this is a regression to me.
When I open a spreadsheet from an email, I now have to click the edit mode at the top to be able to do anything with it.
Microsoft making it increasingly difficult to for someone to install addin or execute macros, you now have to disable many security settings. More pain for my ass, particularly if I need to do this with my colleagues computers.
Lots of small things like that, that balance the many nano-improvements that appeared over 20 years.
> Well to start with, if you format a table in excel and copy-paste it to powerpoint, the formatting now disappears. The only way seems to paste it as an image which is pretty bad.
Paste it as an EMF and it works perfectly. EMF is the Microsoft alternative to an SVG.
Some professional third-party tools append metadata to that EMF to allow for easy tracking of the original source file. So the user can customize formatting in Excel and use PPT just to build the output
But we are talking about a table here. There is really no good reason not to leave the format. All formatting in excel map to a formatting in ppt. And it worked fine only a couple of versions ago!
That's false. Some features not available at 2005:
- 2007: Ribbon UI
- PowerPivot / PowerQuery / PowerView
- Integration with OneDrive (Office talks to server)
- Office Online Server (Office Lite in web in cloud or self hosted)
- Not a feature, but subscription model + value added services users get.
PowerPoint supports importing SVGs since at least 2016. I am using them constantly and do everything in SVG. Export to SVG you can’t - but online converters make that easy.
Excel Supports JSON and s bunch of other stuff via PowerQuery which is the new way to do things.
Office Development is totally fine, but I would agree with you that development of Add-Ins is slow and there aren’t many I would use.
That's weird. My SVGs do not get rasterized when resizing. I just tried (Powerpoint 2019) and I can resize, move, turn, mirror, cut etc. and they stay in vector form.
Not at any of the companies I have worked for or consulted for in the past 5 years. At least at the Fortune 500 level. I love using new tools but Google sheets is nowhere near Excel for more complex projects.
That’s probably true, but in the most of the cases when it gets too complicataed for Google Sheets it shouldn’t be a spreadsheet at all.
KPMG consultants sent us a lot of forms built in spreadsheets and that’s an abomination that should have been a simple webpage.
I'm not going to defend KPMG, but spreadsheets are how things get done when you're in your cube and you just need it done.
Spinning up "a webpage form" in a corporate environment has A LOT of overhead and complications. It can't be done on the fly.
In many places, creating "a webpage" means putting up something on Sharepoint and possibly dealing with it's BOFH. That's a rabbit-hole I would not wish on my worst enemy!
You are definitely right, but there are practical issues. I have a very tight budget that never lets me invest in new tools. Our team has learned (well as much as you can learn) VBA to solve more complex issues in Excel because it's easy to hand a complicated spreadsheet over to a non technical colleague get feedback rather than have an application developed. I'd love to learn how to do that kind of stuff, believe me, but it's just not where we spend our budget dollars. There's also info security concerns, and yes, you can argue how secure is a spreadsheet, but a cool tool like Publisheet will never get approved because we'd be sending all our data server side.
Fair enough. I assumed everyone here was some sort of a dev, I haven’t installed office and refuse to install it. I just use the google services for any ancient documents clients send my way.
Consider that it's you who's missing out. Instead of thinking of MS Office as something non-tech-savvy people use, consider that Excel is the most widely successful environment for reactive programming and small-to-mid-scale data analysis in history. And despite its warts, it's good at what it does.
Ironically, it's also a powerful case of democratization of programming - I can't think of any other piece of software that allowed so many non-tech users to write their own programs. This created tremendous productivity gains, by enabling bottom-up problem solving at scale. Sure, for anything you do in Excel there probably is a SaaS available. But with Excel, you get to own your data, Excel is much faster than that a web SaaS, works off-line, you don't have to pay for it extra, you don't have to get corporate to deal with procurement and negotiate terms, and everything works together - unlike SaaS, where number one principle is siloing data and minimizing interoperability.
Google Sheets in particular is not a substitute of Excel for anything but most casual and undemanding of use cases. It's a heavy web app that barely works on cheap machines, chokes on complex data, and has nowhere near the UX/ergonomy of Excel.
The seemingly popular view that you should use whatever fly-by-night SaaS that's currently popular for your use case instead of Excel sounds to me like asking why would you have a fridge in your house when there's a dinner delivery service, a pizza delivery service, a fruit delivery service and an alcohol delivery service all available. Why own a general-purpose tool when you can subscribe to specific services?
I dont understand why me as a developer is using MS excel? or excel at all. I live in a JS world and my data is always noSQL/JSON or for relational purposes some sort of SQL.
I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons. And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered, simple example google analytics etc
Developers develop different things. Some are crunching websites or GUIs all day long, but others sometimes have some numbers to crunch (at or after work), or things to prototype. So YMMV, but I maintain that it's better to check out good tools than not, because sometimes you discover new things to do after learning how they can be done.
> I would never export a DB to crunch numbers in excel for a plethora of reasons.
You wouldn't, but you might want to connect to one every now and then to test out some ideas.
> And for any statistical insight i would hope the service itself you are using [because i know you're not reinventing the wheel here] would provide you with the correct numbers with graphs you would have never even considered
A service you're using provides you with insights they want you to have, and their time and scope for creating new features is usually limited to the "minimum viable user". If that's the only thing you need then you're golden, but sometimes you need to ask questions or do something with data that isn't offered by the service.
What I'm trying to say is this: Excel is to tabular data what Unix scripting is to text. A convenient and powerful way to solve a lot of problems in a small fraction of time it would take to find an off the shelf solution or develop a marketable-quality product. You're a developer, so you probably don't need it all that much (though sometimes using a spreadsheet really is faster than writing a script). But non-developers do.
Nice! Using spreadsheets as a DB are trend now. Also Spreadsheets are pretty good CMS as well, so people can use it to create websites without code. I made an app called https://Sheet2Site.com which takes your Google Sheet of items/objects and translates it into an app, with filters and images
Not just a trend now, it has been a pattern for many years: if you worked in/with/for many office environments you'll be exposed to a great many "database" uses of Excel & similar and you will find features specific to such uses in spreadsheet products. Some businesses, including large investment banks, would completely grind to a halt if Excel stopped working!
Very cleanly done - though I really doubt this needs to be a subscription. I'm gonna keep this in my notes - it may come in handy someday for a one-off report or presentation, for which I would gladly plunk down a few bucks.
Really nice, tried with a chart and worked smoothly.
Just for fun: would be nice to know max publishing - I just tried 1k * 30 columns and it errored out. I wanted to see how I could interact with a large chart of data.
This looks really nice but I'd like to see a more complex example with several complex functions and updating at least 500 fields at the same time.
Then we see how fast it is...
in case of complex functions / many fields it is more logical to use a database and BI tool that displays/visualizes data from this database as a report.
Is this the OP posting? Out of everything on the page, the logo is possibly the worst part of it (a 'P' in a circle). And this made you create an account and then post here?
Then there are lots of web app builders, including Calculoid (https://www.calculoid.com), Calconic (https://www.calconic.com), uCalc Pro (https://ucalc.pro) and Calcapp (https://www.calcapp.net/lp/website-calculators/), that require more work to get from an Excel sheet to a web app, but get the job done with an end result that doesn't look like a spreadsheet. How does Publisheet improve on the competition?
(Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Calcapp.)