[arethuza]

Some feedback:

- Getting the license key was a bit slow, I went through the process of getting a reminder before the original turned up (I guess I'm impatient - but it's annoying when I had to hunt around my Junk Mail/Deleted Items to see where the license had gone). Why bother with a license for a demo?

- I find the appearance is too different to Excel so is a bit jarring

- The animations are cute, but not sure that they actually aid usability

- Although my initial reaction wasn't that positive it did actually grow on me but I think it needs an obvious immediate impact to demonstrate a clear benefit over the standard Trace Precedents/Dependents

- I can actually think of one scenario where this would have been pretty useful. I was designing a industrial modelling application that had been "prototyped" as an extremely complex Excel application - I had to spend a lot of time showing people that the calculations in the spreadsheet weren't what people thought they were - so having some way of automatically generated documentation of parts of a spreadsheet would have been useful.

Overall - not bad, but I think you really need to nail the exact pain points this would be useful for. Maybe also drop the Tony Stark/Avengers example - it's cute but might not appeal to your target market.

[f292]

Thanks for the feedback. The big pain point we are focussing on is when you are given someone else's spreadsheet that you are not familiar with. It then can take hours to get your head around how they have put it together.

In this regard, Slate is most useful as way of semi-automatically documenting the spreadsheet.

We made the Iron Man example specifically for HN - possibly not the best thing to pitch big financial firms with - fair point!

[arethuza]

"It then can take hours"

I've spent weeks trying to understand a large spreadsheet. Mind you, a lot of that was persuading people that I was correct when I said what it was actually doing was at odds with what they though it should have been doing!