The "Suddenly any financial analyst in your company, <i>given the right permissions</i>" comment is telling. The companies that would be most likely to use a service like Blockspring would be the types of companies that would <i>never</i> 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 (<a href="https://www.blockspring.com/business" rel="nofollow">https://www.blockspring.com/business</a> ) offers self-hosting.<p>Case in point, one of the example scripts in the blog post (<a href="https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-by-product-id" rel="nofollow">https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-b...</a> ) requires you to input a <i>Amazon Product Access Key</i> and a <i>Amazon Product Secret Key</i> as parameters.
<a href="https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://www.blockspring.com/about/privacy</a><p>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.
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.<p>[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.
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.<p>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.<p>This is dangerous.
I think this concept has far reaching effects on optimizing white collar operations if you're able create social features based on the data.<p>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?<p>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.
A nice hack for someone who wants to use this tool (granted that it is free for non-corporate customers):<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
<a href="https://open.blockspring.com/browse" rel="nofollow">https://open.blockspring.com/browse</a><p>For anyone who wants to view the actual blockspring UI/UX along with what APIs are available.<p>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.
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?
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.<p>Their OSS version is apparently still available at <a href="https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet</a> (haven't tried it.)
Feels narrow and I don't see the payout.<p>"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."<p>This is a small gap. On one side, you have people copy-pasting CSV files into excel and doing it one-off.<p>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?)<p>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)<p>I can see the IFTTT / Zapier comparisons but this is a lot more work and far less reward. Those tools give immediate results.<p>At the end of my integration with Blockspring, I'm left with a table of data that I STILL have to analyze in Excel.
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.
Does everybody need to learn to code?<p>One's health is pretty important to one's staying alive - not everyone learns to be a doctor.<p>Finance and accounting is the lifeblood of a business, not everyone learns to be an accountant.<p>Everyone can do it, you should - no you must - do it too. I think it devalues the profession.
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.
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.
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.