[kfk]

Finance here. Just gave it a try, it won’t fly. There are 2 types of finance: those that take a spreadsheet as it is and just “use” it; those that read formulas. Neither of the 2 is going to get any value from this. On the other hand, finance has a lot of drill downs going on (think going from global to region to country to entity etc.) and I like the way he is displaying data trees going out of Excel for it.

[f292]

We think a lot of the value in Slate will lie in the ability to alter the level of detail you can see in the model. One of the really exciting ideas we have is to allow you to group together nodes in a tree to form a "parent node" representing some higher level functionality (e.g. by geographical region as you suggest, maybe EMEA forecast for example) . Then there will be the option to take the general overview of the spreadsheet, or dive down into the details.

[kfk]

Hi, then if you are building this you should put a real database in the middle and work on hierarchies, structures, mappings, comparisons and drill downs. You should allow multiple users to pull data from said db into their Excel. You should do this better than the existing (crappy) solutions like HFM or BPC. If you do that, I see quite a lot of value for finance-controlling.