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Comment by kelvin0 | Hacker News Reader

I really like this guy's tenacity and clever use of excel. But from my experience you can use excel files as an ODBC database source (Windows).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-...

Once you create your ODBC source from the excel files, you can run queries and use the language of your choice (Python,C# ....). I am pretty sure you can also insert/update rows and columns too.

Wondering how this differs from the approach I describe (which has existed for many years).

Good work!

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Primarily, it's a lot more convenient. There's no setup involved, you just click and and the data is available through SQL or C#. There's no need to clean the data around the tables, it works on live data (file does not need to be saved), no connection strings to set up or boilerplate code to write.

There's more, e.g. the SQLite engine can interact with Excel and fiddle with formatting, but I think the major thing is convenience. As a dev, most times I just wouldn't bother with the ODBC approach unless I really had to. Convenient C# and SQL though, I'd use them at least 10x more often.

Are you ever worried about Microsoft a feature that acts similar in a future version of Excel? It's a problem that has bit others before (Firebug, Growl, tabbed-browsing extensions for IE).

Isn't it similar to PowerPivot?

I wouldn't be. The energy is in O365 at the moment, isn't it? VBA is the big programming environment at the moment and it's basically VB6 and hasn't been touched in a long time. There's also that JavaScript thing, which I think is still pretty half-baked.

The JavaScript office API looks like a good solution for integrating your UI within the app. It’s still quite limited in terms of heavier capabilities, eg data processing etc. That’s probably because right now MS is focused more on a shared plugin API for all office products than on deep integration of any one specific product.

I don't think Microsoft would be able to produce something that was just ready, without having to create a project or click through a wizard first.

Much of this functionality is available already, through ODBC, powershell, c# - but it's cumbersome to use. That's the selling point of this software, it seems to me.

You guys, Microsoft just acquires the already built project and our happy dev get his mansion.

yeah, but what color though?

Play your cards right and you get any color of your choice

See the Dropbox HN argument.

Polish.

Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Holy hell, that's Drew Houston!

To be honest - dropbox is still burning investors money, right? AFAIK they are not profitable even today.

They’re about to IPO. Doesn’t mean they’re profitable, but it does mean their finances are healthy enough that they can be publicly traded.

They already IPO’d. :-)

Excellent shorthand.

It would be even better if BrandonM also commented here ;)

Not OP, but even today I still don't understand why is Dropbox different except for hype and media coverage - there were many similar services back then (including integrating as a virtual drive on Windows) and we have literally tons of these services now.

> there were many similar services back then

Citations please.

I read a quote of Drew's a while back that stuck with me. Just googled and found it:

"When Dropbox was getting off the ground in 2007, there were hundreds of small storage companies. It was almost a cliche, the way that many people believe mobile photo sharing is a cliche now, he says. “The important thing was, I would keep asking people if they used any one of these hundred options, and they all said no. These are my favorite problems to solve. You can’t focus on what everyone else is doing — it has to be about what’s really broken and what you can do to fix it.”"

http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Foun...

He should've said what he did differently - seamless integration (aka virtual drive in Windows) was a selling point, but again, other services also had this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchroniza...

You can find when each of these companies were founded by following the links...

Don't remember the name, but I remember similar service even in late 90s, when dial-up was popular. You'd pay for some amount of storage hosted on their servers (no "cloud" term back then) and they had Windows client integrated as a drive. Not sure if they had "freemium", maybe dropbox differentiated with this business model.

Dropbox's solution was significantly more streamlined than any of the others. You installed it and it just worked as the saying goes.

Was the web interface there from the start?

If it is the case, you did not even have to install it.

Dropbox did not only solve 'local file system'-mirroring, but (legal) file sharing in general.

Oh god. I was so confused by your comment because this guy is on a Polish accelerator and I was trying to figure out how that was relevant.

I noticed directly after posting, decided to keep it.

No pun in ten did get upvotes though.

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