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What can't you do in Excel? | nadim: Some thoughts:-With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there.-Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, an... |
Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web? | jjguy: "semantic web" is a buzzword, too ill-defined to allow anyone to define themselves with it label of "semantic web programmer."The intellectual academics point at the rise of standards, structured information and shout "the semantic web is here!"The pragmatic implementers point at the reams and reams and reams of... |
What can't you do in Excel? | swombat: Hmm, I've seen some pretty hair-raising stuff done with Excel already... I don't think we need to increase its capabilities any further. It's an extremely powerful piece of software already. |
What can't you do in Excel? | skmurphy: The fundamental problem is that Excel forces a novice (and actually everyone) to work at a level of detail such that key elements of the plan or analysis are lost in a forest of low level code. I would focus on the novice because it will be hard to get power users to switch. Letting a user pick a range or dis... |
How to avoid being "taken lightly" at work? | tjr: There was an episode of Happy Days in which Richie got into a little trouble, and Fonzie gave him advice on how to act tough and command respect. It didn't work for Richie. Fonzie then remembered the key component: it wasn't just acting tough; at some point in time, you had to have actually won a fight to prove it... |
What can't you do in Excel? | ecommercematt: In no particular order, here are some desirable features:1) Version control.
2) Access restrictions and permissions. BONUS: Responsibilities, a la Siebel and other CRMs.
3) Simple drag and drop manipulation of data, such as concatenation.
4) Wufoo-like ease with building data entry forms.
5) Dummy da... |
What can't you do in Excel? | frig: Quantrix is already a better excel and look how well they're doing for themselves (or not).But seriously: take a gander at quantrix, rip off its features, slap yourself on the back for innovating, and go home.Edit: the above is perhaps a bit too snarky to be helpful.As a "power spreadsheet user" I moved on from e... |
What can't you do in Excel? | jderick: I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the ability to import that same format. |
What can't you do in Excel? | markessien: Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | hpduong: im really interested in this, also. |
What can't you do in Excel? | colinplamondon: Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything. |
What can't you do in Excel? | nailer: I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a dictionary in a cell. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bprater: Hmm, having a private repo might be pretty nice.I wonder if the Dropbox cats have thought about doing something like this? They could continue acting as a "controller" and route data elsewhere. |
What can't you do in Excel? | nailer: A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before.findincolumn('john',a)
scrollaccross(3)
retrievedata |
What can't you do in Excel? | thorax: Best ideas I have here:* Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets.* Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | minimee: hmmm... i've been looking for something like this for a while now also.
I've also considered making one of my own. |
What can't you do in Excel? | aaw: I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:1. Ability ... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bjclark: Webdav + some simple scripting could do it on any server. That's basically what the "iDisk" for .Mac is. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | mechanical_fish: You could hack something together using rsync, or unison. But, frankly, if neither of these things does what you want out of the box you will quickly find yourself spending more time than it's worth to save the $99 annual cost of a 50GB Dropbox account.I use unison to sync a bunch of folders between my... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | newt0311: SVN with webdav and apache would work. |
Entering the market place | shafqat: If you're in the area, you should drive down to Geneva and meet us (NewsCred). We're always looking for smart/interesting folks... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | dw0rm: Just use any vcs. afaik there is svn behind Dropbox. |
What can't you do in Excel? | c1sc0: Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and 'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be accessed by us com... |
What can't you do in Excel? | pasbesoin: diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae, cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting recognition of intracell text formatting.Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then the data format and API's will be less... |
What can't you do in Excel? | sebg: As someone who works in an investment bank, it would be great if this new, more powerful spreadsheet played nicely with Bloomberg, Reuters, and Factset. |
Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web? | ieatpaste: Data-based startups will be implement internally before it hits popularity. This is supported by semantic-esque elements have shown up in many APIs (such as Amazon).In my startup, we're using ARC (http://arc.semsol.org/) and microformats internally; however, we're not doing it just for the sake of new techno... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | old-gregg: I run a combination of rsync+git as cron jobs. They keep all 4 computers in the house in sync with each other as well as backups on a NAS.Why even bother with rsync you may ask? Because for huge binary files (like RAW/JPEG images) I don't need a history of changes and they don't compress well, i.e. git would... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | jodrellblank: Yes it would be potentially useful/lucrative to be able to license and rebrand the Dropbox technology (server + clients) but self-hosted.[Edit: no, not the Dropbox technolgy; the Dropbox experience.] |
What can't you do in Excel? | imp: Smart conversions. If I have a graph of something in Celsius, I have to copy the data, edit it, and create a new graph just to convert it to Fahrenheit. Same with any other unit of measurement. When I was an engineer my biggest gripe with Excel was that it didn't know anything about my data. |
finding a more quantitative/researchish job? | indigoviolet: send me your resume. my email is in my profile. |
What can't you do in Excel? | jodrellblank: An interactive shell (Python, with Excel objects and helper methods ready provided). |
What can't you do in Excel? | MaysonL: Have it interface with Fluidinfo.com. [which should be going alpha sometime soon] |
What can't you do in Excel? | jmackinn: I am a huge fan of Excel. It's the program that I use most for doing work.At the entry user end, there are so many features that are simply unusable or technically way to difficult. For the power user of Excel, there is very little that can't be accomplished. It's power is basically limitless with VBA (or ... |
What can't you do in Excel? | niels_olson: Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559 |
Online C++ Resources? | IsaacSchlueter: Accelerated C++ is here: http://www.amazon.com/Accelerated-Practical-Programming-Exam...And, of course, there's the STL, but it's more a reference than a how-to: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/ |
What can't you do in Excel? | lisper: http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | babul: Slightly off topic here, but as many people are mentioning rsynch, I was wondering if it is possible to get rsynch working on a cellphone/smartphone.I was intrigued by the idea of making a universal backup/synch client based on rsynch. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | RobGR: It seems to me that the file-sharing and version tracking are two different things that should have two different problems.If you want this but on your own servers, maybe check out ringlight: http://ringlight.us/ |
What can't you do in Excel? | brent: I do not use Excel regularly and I thus am certainly not a power user. However, I would think scripting for plots would be useful (like I do in matlab or matplotlib) for repetitive, highly configured, high quality plots with the ability to easily export them as ps or pdf. This may very well be possible now (an... |
Learning resources for MS SQL Server? | sker: I always have this opened in a tab:http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php/Category:Microsoft_SQL...It's not exactly a beginner's tutorial but I like it because it covers a lot of use cases. Also, it's short and to the point.I hope you find it useful. |
What can't you do in Excel? | Spyckie: 1.) automatic smart chart creation - the spreadsheet guesses the kind of data I'm inputting and builds a chart on the fly.2.) UI that values datasets over data points, or some sort of functionality that defines a dataset. Since most tasks deal with sets as a whole (and not individual points) this would result ... |
Online C++ Resources? | bayareaguy: Here are some references I review whenever I need to work with C++.* The GNU C++ Library Documentation - http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/spine.html* Scott Meyers TR1 Information - http://www.aristeia.com/EC3E/TR1_info.html* Association of C & C++ users - http://accu.org* C++ Library Reference http:/... |
Where do you find good testers? | cperciva: I mentioned that I was working on secure online backups on my blog back in 2006, and by the time I was ready for beta testers I had a long list of people who had emailed me to express interest. Once I had all of those people testing tarsnap and still wanted more testers, I posted again to my blog and submitt... |
Musicians? | nickfox: I've been playing guitar and singing for a good number of years. I'm working on my second music video. It's the song Patience by Guns n' Roses. My first music video was Across the Universe by the Beatles. I don't have very good "stage presence" in my first video but the one I'm working on now will be much bett... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | mileszs: For an rsync-like solution that also handles the tar-ing and (GnuPG) encryption of whatever directory you want to backup, take a look at duplicity (if you're on some Linux flavor). http://duplicity.nongnu.org/It is a command-line solution, and simple to throw in cron. In addition, you can use it to back thin... |
What can't you do in Excel? | JeffL: I would like to do conditional formatting on one column based on the contents of another column. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | vaksel: add adsense or have a mission once a month to raise funds in exchange for points |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | astrec: Perhaps something around event or product based missions e.g Partner with X Corp, who to celebrate the release of product Y run a that requires the novel use of Y etc. Otherwise, what vaksel said... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | drinian: BackupPC http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ is probably what you're looking for, although I can't tell you about the encryption part. I am just starting to look into serious backup solutions myself. |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | bayareaguy: Here's an article that reviews two possibly relevent open source tools - http://www.linux.com/feature/154149Unison File Synchronizer: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unisonDirSync Pro: http://directorysync.sourceforge.net/ |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | tapinko: I was thinking of something with 'WOOT' ? Maybe doing something where people win prizes daily (for solving missions)-P |
What can't you do in Excel? | crsmith: Freeze multiple, unconnected columns and rows.That way I could view the descriptions at the top and the sums at the bottom while I'm scrolling through any point in a spreadsheet. |
What can't you do in Excel? | egl: You can't tell whether you got the right answer.My rule of thumb is that any interesting spreadsheet has a mistake. Anyone who uses a spreadsheet and doesn't independently know the answer "close enough" is living in a fool's paradise. |
What can't you do in Excel? | neilk: 1. Really, really great looking graphs. Excel fails so hard at this it's unbelievable.2. Easy navigation. The giant spreadsheet model is a very simple metaphor but sometimes I'd like a way to jump to different parts of it more easily.3. Not be a spreadsheet. The one-big-sheet model might be better represented as... |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | Jebdm: If it has a significant community, have meetups with an entry fee with prizes, etc. Get sponsored prizes. Make a Facebook app (increased ad revenue). Honestly, I don't see it being incredibly profitable, but it is a neat idea. |
Online C++ Resources? | psyklic: If you want training, I recommend books (which teach you very efficiently).If you want the latest tips, tricks, and ways of thinking, then I recommend blogs (which are highly inefficient). |
What can't you do in Excel? | mwexler: One interesting model of where spreadseets may go is Resolver, at http://code.google.com/p/resolver/ or http://www.resolversystems.com/. Most of the issues complained about here can be solved through the Python back end. |
Where do you find good testers? | thomatas: You could setup a project on Amazon Mechanical Turk or use some service that offers a management layer on top of it like UserTesting.com. |
What can't you do in Excel? | critic: They must be very good, if they are expected to come up with something within a few months that will be able to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Open Office.I can't wait to see it. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | jmackinn: Why don't you have a mission about how Daily Mission can make money? |
What can't you do in Excel? | ken: Separation of data, formulas, and graphs (a la MVC). It shouldn't be a mystery to me whether a number is data I've entered, or a result of a computation.It should also have a real solver, so I don't have to work out formulas on paper first. If I can type in some equations (legibly) and it's possible to derive th... |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | noodle: sponsored missions.if people complete missions to rack up points to become top users, offer an advertising program that companies can tie higher point missions into their product somehow. |
Online C++ Resources? | scott_s: http://www.boost.orgThe next time you find yourself saying "I wish C++ let me do X" or "I wish the STL had a library for Y" take a moment to search through Boost. You might find something that fits your needs.I've read a lot of hate for Boost. I personally make a point to use it everytime it provides functiona... |
What can't you do in Excel? | kirubakaran: Emacs key bindings please. |
SlinkSet or Pligg? | medianama: Having tried Pligg for a while, I can tell you SPAM is a huge problem. Couple of weeks after the site went live, I started getting all these registrations from bots that I had to spend 30 minutes daily to clean that up... ultimately, I had to disable new user registrations, which kills the whole thing..not s... |
Any DIY/installable alternatives to Dropbox? | edb: I always thought that dropbox would be much better if I could tie it together with my S3 account and just have all the data saved there, to an unlimited amount paid by me. |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | chris11: You could sell numbered prizes to the winners, like t-shirts and other marked swag announcing how great the winner did.You might link the cost to the buyers position in the winner's list. I know one t-shirt company sells limited edition t shirts and charges a dollar per edition number (e.g. $20 for #20, $1 for... |
What can't you do in Excel? | gcanyon: As others have written, some of the things I've longed for in Excel are found in Numbers -- they're also available in Ragtime: the ability to place multiple spreadsheets independently in a single document and work on full ranges within them. Ragtime adds rotation of spreadsheet objects.I prefer lightweight dat... |
Musicians? | nose: I am re-learning the piano. |
What can't you do in Excel? | iigs: Disclaimer: not particularly a power user. Problem also probably more of a UI/UX issue than a technical issue.From time to time when I'm working in excel I'll find I've derived an answer from a couple adjacent input cells and several intermediate calculation step cells below. As a contrived example, lets say I ha... |
Learning resources for MS SQL Server? | gaius: There is loads of great content on MSDN, tutorials, references, magazine articles, etc. |
Anyone want to work through SICP together? | daniel-cussen: I got through it in a sense. I attempted every problem of the first of the five sections, and solved most of them. Then I worked with a tutor who looked through the rest of it and decided to work on something closer to the state of the art. I wouldn't say what I learned was better than SICP, but it wa... |
What can't you do in Excel? | nrao123: I have not read all the comments since there are too many of them. Here is my wish list(I am an ex- Mgmt consultant) without knowing if its already covered in the comments:
1) Creating a new tab/sheet and choosing if the tab should be a document or spreadsheet type so that I can run my numbers once and referen... |
What can't you do in Excel? | PoweredByWill: OLE is a joke, if this is a client-side application add embeddable spreadsheet widgets.Pivot-tables would be nice as a core function to model data (see quantrix.com)Make 'light databases' part of the architecture and not counter-design.
something like, spreadsheets meets csv with a cli query component or... |
finding a more quantitative/researchish job? | nailer: Apply for a job at a hedge fund. Our best and brightest are all quants. |
Where do you find good testers? | trapper: I've always thought an exclusive, invite only beta testing site where the company throws up 500$ or so, and everyone who tests and nitpicks gets a share would be awesome. |
What can't you do in Excel? | jblondon: 1. It should be possible to turn a sheet into a function. So I can then define my own 'inputs' and 'outputs' for that sheet, and 'call' it with whatever parameters I like from another sheet. Sure it can be done in code, but for building large, maintainable models that's not practical.2. 'Hard' and 'Soft' numb... |
What can't you do in Excel? | vincentvwyl: Instead of the programming angle, I would like a user-interface that works for right-brained people and doesn't drive you bonkers after spending more than a few hours on it. That would be a blue ocean in the world of spreadsheets. |
Anyone want to work through SICP together? | sgaur: Please add me too |
Is there a site dedicated to startup news and job postings? | david927: For start-up jobs there's startuply.comFor start-up tech news and information, there are a million sites for every taste and size. |
What can't you do in Excel? | chris_l: For conventional programming I've been working on laying the logic out as a graph automatically. Instead of cryptic formulas in the cells, you would have an easy to understand graph that shows how information is related and computed. In addition the intermediate results for selected input values could be shown... |
What can't you do in Excel? | gsiener: FWIW, I would often query a database and make completely de-normalized datasets that I'd paste into Excel. Then I would pivot the crap out of them and figure out how I wanted to slice the data... |
What can't you do in Excel? | khafra: The ability to do regex matches to cells, not just full exact text with a case sensitive/insensitive option. |
What can't you do in Excel? | Vitriol: Please do pivot tables |
Help This Startup Find A New Revenue Model? | bemmu: If you don't mind being a bit seedy, sign up to Offerpal Media / Super Rewards and give users extra points from completing their offers. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | drhowarddrfine: No one wants to install yet another unused technology (Silverlight) for an unknown new product. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | pclark: wow, really impressive application (I made an account)I couldn't get "website" resources to work? when I load them it just fails, odd!the app wasn't full screen for me by the way, merely full window :)How did you find Silverlight to develop in? are you on twitter? you should be :) |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | Encosia: It's crashing both IE8 and FF3 when I attempt to type the first character in the email address field on the login page.Silverlight version 2.0.31005.0. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | jawngee: Well to start, rethink the EC2 web serving, you're spending more money than you need to. Consider linode or slicehost as bandwidth is way cheaper than amazon.Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thr... |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | axod: * It's way too shiny. Like by a factor of a billion.
* I can't find somewhere to just click "Free - go - try it"
* And I have to install silverlight??? You've just reduced your potential market to a very small niche. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | tomh-: It looks very cool, I just created an account. Not sure if its usefull for me, but it is at least interesting to see a nice silverlight app. Did you build it with Blend or just Visual Studio? Personally I would pick Flex due the market share it got. But silverlight is much more enjoyable to develop with. Mainly ... |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | ttrashh: Very impressive. I tried a word doc and a web page...nice UI.I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to an image? |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | ashleyw: • Silverlight could be an issue, the adoption rate isn't that great so the majority of visitors would have to install a plugin to be able to do anything — people get turned away from sites because of a slow loading page, so being prompted to install a plugin may be enough for them to bounce back to where they ... |
What can't you do in Excel? | abc3: I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._GoogleThe thing Excel doesn't do as well as... |
What can't you do in Excel? | timae: I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get GoogleChartsAPI url".That'd be sweet. |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | siong1987: Ok. I spent 10 minutes to download SilverLight and restarted my browser just to view the video. Why don't you just use the flash video player?Then, when I proceeded to the sign up page, I were "amazed" that you created the price plan with SilverLight too. And, it took time to load again just to view the pric... |
Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration | dan_sim: This is a general point of view but I don't see the perks in using any RIA technologies (Flash or Silverlight) when javascript librairies are available everywhere (and I'm talking about jquery). What can you do with silverlight that can't be done with jquery?I didn't try the app (because of silverlight) but I ... |
What to do with a spare computer? | speek: Asterisk.Samba share.Pluto home (really nifty home automation + media server). |
What to do with a spare computer? | quellhorst: Give it to someone who has an even older computer. |
What to do with a spare computer? | vaksel: gut it for parts, add the RAM and HD to your current computer.Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc. |
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