Re:Show HN: A Better Excel Data API
by kumarski on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @01:29PM
(#7219302)
I'm having trouble figuring out the exact use case. Who is this product for?
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This is primarily for analytics and other data companies with non-technical customers. They get requests for data in spreadsheets, and they usually manage that by generating and sending over one-off CSV's.
Voyager is an interface that's easier to use for the devs, and much easier for the end-users.
Re:Show HN: A Better Excel Data API
by yangcanvas on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @02:02PM
(#7219586)
I'd imagine that the most common use cases will be the ones where people are already using excel, where the python is definitely an improvement over python, the default and only other programming language integrated with excel.
I used it to validate my an algorithm written in python, which was basically a many-step series of matrix multiplications
datanitro basically served as a debugger, letting me 'show my work' at each step in the algorithm, outputting matrices to excel spreadsheets as it ran. Excel provides a pretty good set for validating that the output at each step matched expectations, like conditional formatting where you can color cells based on their value and other math and graphing functionality
I can say for sure that I prefer using python with excel to using VBA, the only other previous option.
Re:Show HN: A Better Excel Data API
by Nicholas_C on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @02:21PM
(#7219734)
Although I find programming fun in general, using VBA is definitely not as fun as other languages. If I had more complicated uses for macros I would definitely shell out the $100 for it.
This site is actually for a new product: an API that lets developers push data (from any language, over REST) to the spreadsheets of end-users.
Not directly related to VBA or Python =)
Re:Show HN: A Better Excel Data API
by Nicholas_C on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @07:49PM
(#7221731)
I know, I was just commenting on the poster's musings about DataNitro and Python/VBA. Great work btw, a really cool product.