Really love the way, it looks. But can give more detailed review once I get to see the customization implementation. Let me know when you are giving out invites.
This is cool, I'll be sharing it with a bunch of people. But you might want to share the demo link https://www.useslate.com/use so that people instantly try it out. Not so much explanation on that page to make them bite though.
Almost all Excel users are not programmers, you're definitely right. If by clerical workers you mean people who are just entering data into the sheet or reading an output then, yes, they don't need to understand what the sheet is doing.
However there are loads of people who build there own sheets: analysts, consultants, managers, marketing, accountants and yes engineers. These are the people who spend the most time using excel. Excel let's you build a very complex model formula by formula. It's often a model more complex than you might be able to map out initially. Whilst they are not programmers they are still smart enough to understand the sheets they've built. The issue is Excel right now is so opaque about what its doing and where the numbers come from. It makes this task much harder than it needs to be.
Oh don't you dare! Run an a/b test first, before you disable autoplay. If autoplay gets more signups then keep it. You're not here to be our friend and drink tea, you're running a business.
From a design point of view, I LOVE your desaturated forest look with the logo. It's all very memorable
I know what you mean though. I have chrome plugins installed that prevent autoplay, flash, widgets, facebook, and a whole lot of other things. It's awesome I can have 40+ tabs open and not have to worry about lag.
I don't personally, but I could imagine our company might. That being said, we use Box and other "insecure" places to upload files. I argue that as long as you have a policy in place that what is uploaded isn't shared without permissions given, I'm sure we wouldn't have problem uploading.
Thinking about it more though, keeping it integrated into excel or offline has its merits. We have 20mb+ financial models that would take forever for your software to churn through.
-A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row.
-None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded.
-We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.
We have some pretty powerful in-hourse tools for visualizing information flow within a given worksheet. It will overlay borders around contiguous blocks of identical (R1C1) formulas and color code based on whether the cell has a value, a formula an off-sheet formula and cross-file formula, etc...
However, where our tools fail, and where your tool really shines is transforming the spreadsheet visual paradigm into something that more closely resembles the intent of the model. Very cool! (I signed up)
