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 ;-)

> If something existed for Excel + PowerPoint...

Isn't that SlideShare you're asking for? If not can you explain more please?

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

The Calculoid people have publicly disclosed (https://github.com/calculoidapp/calculoidapp.github.io/wiki/...) they they're using this library for evaluating formulas:

https://silentmatt.com/javascript-expression-evaluator/

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:

https://github.com/davidpolberger/formulajs

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.

Your website JavaScript was ruining my browser history. I had more then 10 entries and could not go “back”.

Just a friendly heads-up.

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.

Again, thanks for reporting the bug!

This issue should now be fixed. Thanks again for reporting it!

Ooohhhhhh i really like this info.

Here is what i want, i want a cleaner way to parse a pdf into an xls or csv and be able to edit it on mobile ....

Have any good references?

At least for parsing PDF into table I had decent success with Tabula.

except the last part of "edit it on mobile", you can achieve it with https://extracttable.com

Feel free to direct any questions to [email protected]

Neat! Is your code open-source? Would you like help going mobile-friendly?

Ive emailed you, let’s talk

Is it brain or Brian?

brain

On it, Sam.

you will probably need to hire someone to do that

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.

I haven't tried these, but they claim to do what you want:

https://sheety.co

https://sheetsu.com

https://sheetdb.io

https://sheetlabs.com/

I wonder if there is a self hosted version of any of this stuff...

We (Calcapp) offer self-hosting as part of our corporate plan.