Alternatives
Products that do what Secrets of Mastering Excel does
Inspired by a comment thread yesterday [1] I made this mini site: https://excel.secretgeek.net/ Reason: I often want to share Joel Spolsky's famous "You Suck at Excel" video tutorial with "important" business people inside the large enterprise where I work. But it would be easily misconstrued as trolling if I sent a business customer a URL that literally tells them, right in the heading, that they "suck" at excel. So, as advised by user @TuringTest (in the thread mentioned above) I created a mini site, on its own sub-domain, that is palatable to a business mindset, and…
- 1
- 2KT
I started to track my expenses on excel sheets earlier this year. It was interesting to see how much I spent casually on just another hangout with friends or on education. Excel sheets are painful, at least for me. So I built this with my friend: (it's just MVP) http://accountant.besperk.com Edit: Coming up next: > Mobile site and apps asap. > Graphs and reports > SSL > Custom Alerts (when you cross a certain limit, that you define, for certain tag) > Pre populated tags. Tech used: > Rails > on Heroku My co-founder is offline will ask him to add more details on…
2011
- 3E2Excel 2013▲20
Not exactly a side project but my work for the last 2.5 years. As an avid HN lurker would love to hear feedback. Background: I am a PM on the Excel team in charge of the advanced data analysis tools (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/Products/OfficePreview.aspx) To download: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en
2012
- 4
- 5FW
I've built a plugin for Excel that lets you use SQL inside Excel. Here are two demo/tutorial videos I've made: Damo 1 -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld-mbyAGsow Damo 2 -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vjlEd2-bJQ The website is here: http://thingiequery.com/ I've already posted about it a week ago, but kinda clumsily so this is a repost (it says in the guide that an occasional repost is fine, so here's one). This is the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359128 And here is a Reddit thread on the plugin:…
2015
- 6IT
I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…
2012
- 7IB
Hey HN, This weekend I built an excel spreadsheet so that you can come up with your next (scalable) service idea. If you are a consultant / agency and are looking to move from to build a scalable business / valuable asset, this is for you! WHY I built this: - Many people want to start their business but can't find an idea - Many people build stuff / services that nobody want - Ideas are great but execution is what matters: See what others have done successfully, get inspired, and do your own thing! The framework is called the Productized Service Matrix. --- It features in…
2019
- 8CC
Cheatsheets could be a powerful tool for lots of people, especially a full-stack developer like me, but I hate online cheatsheets for a few reasons: 1. Most online cheatsheets are pdf files or webpages. I can't add my own stuff, nor only take the parts that are useful to me. 2. There is no easy way to search across all the cheatsheets I've collected. 3. Can't make part of a cheatsheet private, therefore, I have to delete sensitive stuff before sharing mine with others. I ended up using multiple txt files to store mine over the years which is cumbersome as well. So I built Cheaki.com. On…
2020
- 9PA
Hi HN, I run a small ecommerce shop and, until recently, spent way too many evenings copy-pasting supplier invoices into Excel so my books stayed clean and my expense tracking was granular. It finally hit me that I’d rather invest that time in code than in Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, so I built ParsePoint.app. Why I built it • Manual invoice entry was swallowing 4 hours every month. • Accounting software APIs felt heavyweight for my use-case; I really just wanted clean rows in a spreadsheet. • I love tinkering with AI models and needed an excuse to spin one up in production. What it does 1. Upload a…
2025 · parsepoint.app
- 10LW
Hey everyone. I'm a founder of a Boston based, venture backed startup, unrelated this this link. One of my business partners and I coded this website DURING long and painful meetings with our attorneys as a way to pass the time. We racked up over $100k in legal bills through a couple fundraising and legal hurdles. This is the website that resulted from that time.<p>We'd love your feedback for version 2.0. Thanks!
2011 · lawyerclock.com
- 11IM
My niche is LSAT prep. I write books of explanations to LSAT practice tests. It's a pretty big industry, as people will pay a lot to improve their odds of law school admissions. I realized that, with my books, I have ~400,000 words of quality content that people search for. Lots of long tail searches for individual LSAT questions. So I made a site of free explanations for the most recent LSAT: http://lsathacks.com/ Took about a week to write them and put them up. If it goes well, I'll release my other explanations. Hope to make this a hub for LSAT study. If it's well received,…
2013
- 12GA
For the past few years, I've been frustrated at how we document our products. The code can tell you what you ended up doing, maybe why you ended up doing it (if your team is disciplined about comments/documents), but it can't tell you why you didn't do what you didn't do. Time and time again, I've seen teams try to change something to a better way, only to realize why it was done the "worse" way in the first place. Documenting decisions not taken is just really hard, ADRs help but doing it for everything is just too noisy and time-consuming. What's more, most of the decisions just…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 13CT
Hello folks! Me and a small group of developers started a free newsletter. The idea is to share 3 web dev tips every Monday. Our goal is to improve our writing skills and share knowledge as much as possible. So far, few hundreds of developers have subscribed and seem to like it. To get a feeling of what kind of stuff we share, here is an example of last Monday's issue: https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=5e499c75818d4611a008adfb5&id=106e5fbc71 If this is something that would interest you, you can subscribe here (its completely free):…
2019
- 14MF
Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…
2012
- 15IB
Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…
Apr 2026 · thehardparts.dev
- 16ST
2014 · blog.treasuredata.com
- 17HC
I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice. I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be…
2011
- 18IM
I'm documenting everything about my process. From learning to code, to building the app, and all the way to my outreach efforts. I'm learning as I go and sharing it with everyone who's not a programer, and is daunted to build a software on their own. Trust me. If I can do it, anyone can! You can find my updates on: https://Claritask.com ...as well as video updates on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmqmifW4kIcPclXigay1dQ Would love to hear your feedback on my progress and if you have any suggestions on what I can do better. There's so many task managers out…
2017
- 19IB
Hello all, I built about 2 years ago a coding website for kids, teens and adults: https://codeguppy.com Despite my efforts to promote the website it is still not well know. I post almost daily about it on Twitter at https://twitter.com/codeguppy ... but even there I don't have views. The website is fun... although I still have a ton of things to add. I appreciate if you take a look and suggest improvements and most importantly help me with spreading the news about this website. I really need a boost! Thanks all!
2021
- 20SC
During my (ongoing) engineering degree, I've often looked up formulas and been frustrated at the lack of reliable results. Some formulas (usually the easy ones) get their own blurb on Google results, while others are a few clicks away, or are most easily accessed by looking at random university slides on Google images. It felt like, in this day and age, there should be a site that serves the small but noble purpose of being a source of truth for formulas, while leveraging modern website technology to provide a fast and user-friendly experience. So, I made stemformulas.com (with some…
2023 · stemformulas.com
- 21IB
Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…
2024 · smartsalebanner.com
- 22IP
Hey hackers, Like many of you, I'm always trying to optimize my productivity, and I have tried a lot of apps out there to do so. I didn't find the exact one that I could use, so I built one for myself. Check it out and let me know if you have any thoughts!
2024 · focusmax.io
- 231O
Hi HN! I'm a 15-year-old dev in Hong Kong who built ExcelTutor.pro. It's an AI assistant that generates Excel formulas, SQL queries, and automation scripts from plain English. Key features: * Infinite usage - no query limits * Formula generation - converts natural language to Excel formulas * SQL Query Builder - creates database queries from prompts * Automation Scripts - automates repetitive spreadsheet tasks Unlike manual solutions, it handles things like: =XLOOKUP(A2,Inventory!B:B,Inventory!F:F,"Not Found") in seconds. No more trial-and-error or Stack Overflow digging. You can: - Describe…
2025 · exceltutor.pro
- 24IB
This site was born out necessity. I needed a break from the internet we know today: clickbait, politics, low quality content, breaking news, AI summaries Such a breadth of information but so little depth Now I spend (too much of) my time here, going deep. Just when I need to scratch that itch. But I keep coming back because it actually makes me a better engineer. Oh, and I made the site. Right. Anyways, I hope you enjoy crawling the blogs as much as I have. Enjoy! And PLZ reply with any feedback. I am here to make this site better. It will always be free.
2025 · codecrawl.co
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