The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel

I don&#x27;t understand why spreadsheets are so fervourously bashed: most times they do the job and in a fast and inclusive way.<p>The spreadsheet is certainly one of the best tools ever invented.<p>[0] Joel&#x27;s Spolsky must-watch talk on Excel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c</a>

Spreadsheets really are the fullest realization we&#x27;ve seen of functional-programming-without-code, and with a built-in (rudimentary) database too. It&#x27;s no wonder they kicked off the microcomputer era and remain essential to this day.

As the author of a specialized inventory management application (a small ERP&#x2F;MRP for electronics production, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partsbox.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partsbox.io&#x2F;</a>), I definitely agree. Spreadsheet is my biggest competitor, but also a great opportunity: while you can start tracking inventory using a spreadsheet, you always eventually outgrow it, which is my opportunity.

Another way of stating this: Many SaaS companies are just CRUD apps for niche verticals. (That&#x27;s not a diss at those companies.)

Excel is not a competitor to our SaaS - it is an interface. Original our service was web and email only (energy market financial data). But we quickly learned our clients want and need that data in CSV so they can build their own tools. So our API integrates well with Excel.<p>And that is the power of Excel - a client can build their own solution, backed by our service. We do the parts that Excel can’t do or do well.<p>This frees us up from the pressure to build customization for any client - we won’t do customization only generalization.<p>We will create new features without any UI - just the API for JSON and CSV. This lowers our costs and development time - UI can be expensive and time consuming.

I&#x27;m surprised neither the article nor any of the HN comments have (so far) mentioned Airtable.<p>Airtable seems to have the main advantage of Excel (it can be customised by a non-technical user) whilst solving some of the limitations (e.g. multi-user, permissions, workflow triggers).<p>Someone who would have built their CRM tool in Excel in the past, might well choose Airtable today.

I don&#x27;t know why nobody mentions this, but if you DO unbundle a feature from excel, it is exceptionally hard to compete on ubiquity. Excel is cheap, and even if you replace part of the functionality, nobody will ever actually beat the price.<p>Personally, I wish I had an excel-like interface for Python&#x2F;Pandas. Instead of sheets, give me modular data frames, and give me a nice GUI for data import&#x2F;export&#x2F;connection.<p>But, the best feature of excel is that the interpreter is built in. No version control, no wondering which version of whatever library is installed. If it is excel, it (mostly) works when I send a file to someone.<p>Most of the time, I use excel because the SaaS tools that I have that do a better job have a per&#x2F;seat cost that is MUCH too high for me to bring casual, one time people into the projects. If companies were more sensible about licenses for casual users, maybe excel would be less relevant.

I actually think there&#x27;s an opportunity in the opposite direction: convert your SaaS apps to spreadsheets.<p>Instead of having to log into 10 different SaaS apps, you simply make a few menu selections from within Excel &#x2F; GSheets and your data is pulled in, ready to be analyzed.<p>The spreadsheet becomes the UI, and the SaaS &quot;apps&quot; are basically databases accessed via an API.

It is an opportunity, but not an easy one.<p>Spreadsheets are good and fine until they&#x27;re not (fine-grained permissions, collaboration, referential integrity and validation enforcement, multiple data source aggregation and ingestion, easy visibility into history and auditing, features that Excel has but people don&#x27;t want to learn, etc).<p>You have to convince customers that what they have going is not actually working, which requires having a discussion about how just because poor data management practices have thus far failed to completely destroy your company, they are wasting tons of time and money. Many of them will have in the back of their mind that they can always go back to how things were before.<p>So the behavioral change&#x2F;change management aspect of a product that really does directly compete against Excel is very challenging.

Does the author mixes up &quot;spreadsheet&quot; with &quot;database&quot; or &quot;data entry&quot; or even &quot;line-of-business app&quot; in general? There&#x27;s more than spreadsheet in many of SaaS examples.

I actually think this article is late and we’re already seeing the next evolution of this trend: flexible SaaS.<p>Right now SaaS products are mostly single-purpose workflows and aren’t super customizable (until the start-up ages and enters a few enterprises who demand customizations). This is a step-up from Excel which was general purpose but didn’t facilitate workflows seamlessly.<p>However what Airtable is finding is almost any specific SaaS can be recreated with general purpose spreadsheet-like products. Essentially they merged the ease of use of Excel with additional shared workflows of SaaS.

How is AirTable not mentioned in this article? If Excel has any major startup competitor my money is on them. I use spreadsheets constantly and work with a lot of people who aren’t the savviest when it comes to technology. AirTable essentially lets them “program” even easier than Excel but also has sharing&#x2F;snapshots of changes over time that everyone can see. It’s not quite a replacement for Excel yet but I absolutely see it heading that direction.

FWIW, I have seen (and have recommended) designing a number of applications with the spreadsheet as their front end. This works particularly well with google sheets, given its reasonable API. It is way richer than anything you will quickly build, is designed for mucking with tabular data (and makes it relatively easy), and it turns out a ton of applications are basically interfaces on tabular data. Hey hey!

Feels like a ton of business could just benefit from automating various spreadsheet tasks via Zapier. I mean this stuff exists and it’s not rocket science but people don’t care to figure it out. I think part of it is people also not wanting to replace themselves out of a job. Does Betty really want to take that 1 hr daily task and turn it into 5 minute weekly task? I don’t know... maybe not.

This is the second front-page post today that is a link to a content marketing firm&#x27;s own content marketing.

The problem with SaaS alternatives to Excel business processes is the difficulty of linking data between apps. Let’s say you want to answer some topical question, like “are code reviews for women and men written with a different tone?” You have a HR system that has people’s gender, and a code review system, and some Google API that measures tone. Good luck stitching this together between vendors. But dump it to Excel and make the API call from VBA and it’s easy.<p>The problem of course is that this becomes an important business metric, making the spreadsheet a critical business application, but without any of the tooling used for successful software development (version control, code review, test automation)

Excel&#x27;s API are increasingly web service friendly.<p>How many people prefer Slack native desktop over the web experience?<p>Excel is the ultimate rich client experience for power users. Maybe we should brining the web to Excel, rather than the other way around?

My anecdote. I work with mining (resource) companies and am mining engineer myself.<p>I reckon one large company coming into our office and spending 2 hours describing their new software to assist with blast design.<p>They gave us a trial and while it was slick, it was not much better than our spreadsheet, that everyone can use and the few extra features they showed we easily implemented ourselves in the spreadsheet.<p>Hate to think how much money was spent developing this software that literally was a pretty GUI over a spreadsheet.

for those who feel the need to version control of excel sheet content (only values, not formulas) I published a tool (only VBA code) I wrote to export the content of every rows of selected sheets (a text file for each row of data, using a unique id contained in the table as filename).<p>the gist is here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stefano77it&#x2F;ea8f20efebc9d51def8527194f39ffb8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stefano77it&#x2F;ea8f20efebc9d51def852719...</a>

Ironically, I work in a regulated industry and every software we use has to be compliant with certain government regulations. We would actually love it if we got to use excel in our business workflow, but we&#x27;re forced to deal with some horribly ungodly mess of softwares that cost tens of thousands of dollars, that do nothing more than have the magic &quot;compliant with X&quot; sticker.

After using Airtable for some critical LOB applications, I&#x27;m beginning to think that Excel&#x27;s biggest competitor is Airtable.

‘Every enterprise software startup is an attempt to replace a spreadsheet.’ —wish I remembered who said that originally

Nice! Spreadsheets are pretty good CMS as well, so people can use it to create websites without code.<p>I made an app called <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Sheet2Site.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Sheet2Site.com</a> which takes your spreadsheet of items&#x2F;objects and translates it into an app, with filters.

Spreadsheets could also be understood as just a fancy pen&#x2F;paper for a manual business process. Looking at it this way, the competition isn’t excel but rather doing things by hand (i.e. a non-solution vs a competitor).

I could imagine a hybrid approach using Google Forms feeding into Google sheets then apply a programming layer via the sheets api

I mean, Workday? That&#x27;s a bit of a stretch.