[agibsonccc]

There's a lot of money to be made in the smaller verticals. I think for a startup, there's a lot of opportunity to allow people to just manipulate and sanitize data in simpler spreadsheets.

For example, one thing I'm being forced to implement myself has been a lot of string manipulation operations to sanitize different kinds of data I'm playing with in spreadsheets.

Even just having something misimported wastes a lot of time.

OpenRefine isn't bad, but can only get you so far. That being said, if I can come up with a complete solution myself, I wouldn't mind just adding it to the suite of tools I'm already offering :)

I'm also wondering about different kinds of tools already out there though.

[bliti]

I once made a simple program that would create excel spread sheets from the input of a barcode scanner. Took me about a day. It made a big impact on the company. Before, they would spend 2 days creating the spread sheet. My program had it done in minutes. They were drop shippers, and went from about 25 pallets a week, to 50 (and kept growing). All in a matter of less than one month. The program was less than 200 LOC.

[agibsonccc]

Exactly! It's a simple concept for a programmer to think about. (A 2d array? How hard could this be?) but really it's crazy how annoying it is to do certain things. Excel has math down pretty well, but encoding other kinds of data or even compiling the data to a spreadsheet is a significant problem for most people.

[bliti]

The biggest problem that company had was fetching the image for each product (it fed from one API). They had to manually insert the image for each one. Imagine a pallet with 200 different products in it! All I did was create a web GUI where they would upload their orders, then the program would fetch all the data, insert the images in the correct row, and generate the file for them. But the file would be sent off to a workstation that was operated as a printer server/queue station. After that, the spreadsheet was automatically printed and the shipping department would get the document in a nicely formatted manner. It weird, but I get excited talking about it. Its the little wins that really count.