I'm banging my head against Excel, wishing for SQL right now! But I could never go to my boss and ask for a purchase order for something called ThingieQuery. Give it a more bland gray name and make a massively expensive corporate site license available, and I think you're onto a winner.
Author here. I'm inclined to agree, the naming is poor, it didn't start out as a serious product, and I never changed the name. That said, you can at least use the trial licence (free for 30 days) and after that who knows, maybe I'll rename the plugin to Excel SQL Studio 3000 XT and add an Enterprise Ultimate Premier License for 1200$.
Personally I think the guy is a moron. If he wasn't banging his head so hard he might realize it's reasonably priced and he can save all the corporate hassle by purchasing it himself.
at $50 i just go to my boss and say "Hey Boss, can i get the company card to buy a $50 product so I can do the xyz task easier?" almost always he'll say "$50, yeah whatever"
This is only the most AMAZING thing to happen to Excel! I got some Excel data from a friend to analyze and went through the usual PivotTable way for a while until I hit a roadblock and I needed something more advanced. I knew how to solve my problem with SQL but not with Excel, so I ended up downloading and installing SQL Server Express. This would have saved me from having to do that. Looking forward to more features.
Nice. Though, from a finance perspective, my daily nightmare is in the sharing piece - not in the analysis piece - of my job. Sharing numbers in spreadsheets and consolidations is a deep un-solved pain in the finance world. But I do see this solution as a potential fix for the many pivot functionalities shortfalls.
Any chance you could expand on some of those pains? Is the problem with simply sharing the data itself or with being able to slice/dice/query/do smth with the shared data? I'm sure there are a bunch of people around here who'd love to hear some user pains/stories to improve their apps.
Well, what do you want to know? I have many horror stories, actually, I just had 1 today - it took me half day to upload 6 Income Statements (6 spreadsheets) to our Company official tool (HFM). This should take no more than a couple of minutes. Other story? Try to run an Opex (Operating Expenses) budget when you need engineering, cus service, mantainance, etc., departments to all give you costs estimates and then try to track those costs (BPC is one other terrible tool that is supposed to help you with this kind of need). I am talking +500 cost centers each one split in cost types, each cost type split in natural accounts. Getting data and dealing with data in those cases can be a nightmare.
But you are right, there is a reporting part too to it. It's just that I think the sharing and data handling piece is the real key. There are many decent reporting solutions out there, none that integrates a serious data sharing/integration solution (I am also referring to data feeds from other systems, other painful topic). One other big topic is integration, companies do not know what an API is, so getting data out of systems usually requires jumping through different hoops of terrible UIs and button clicking.
But hey, if the topic sounds interesting for you and/or others, feel free to send me an email.
I don't know if it's a regional thing or what, but the idiom is usually "color me interested" rather than "paint me interested." Maybe you care, maybe you don't. I've just never seen "paint me interested" like that and thought it was curious.
Looks interesting, how does this work under the hood? Does it use something like sqlite, or mssql? Because surely the syntax for queries is different, the page simply says it supports all SQL, but SQL can vary a lot between databases (or is it your own kind, and in that case yet another variant?)
Yeah, it uses SQLite under the hood. SQLite has a mechanism it calls "virtual tables" which I used to implement an adapter that lets it see Excel tables as database tables. I also implemented hash indexes in the adapter so joins and lookups are crazy fast (searches by range not so much though). SQLite is very cool, it also lets developer hook additional functions into it, which is how I exposed some .NET functions and they can be used from SQL (replacex=Regex.Replace, ismatch=Regex.IsMatch, format=String.Format, etc...)
So what happens when I use this to create a spreedsheet, and I then share this spreadsheet with someone else who doesn't have this tool installed, or doesn't have a license?
Also, if you connect to an external database instead of using the built in SQLite engine, the dialect will be that of the database of course. It works a little differently in this mode though.
Finding this has just made my whole (not great) week better by a huge degree. I've played with it on a workbook with ~100k rows and the performance is fantastic. I'm really excited!
This is what I've wanted to do in excel since forever: a worksheet function that takes a range to use as the table and the SQL query as params, something like:
=QUERYTABLE("SELECT * FROM TABLE", A1:G1000)
I actually wrote my own in VBA that wrapped the ADO/JET db engine but involved writing out the table as a .csv in the background so I could query it. Would love a "proper" solution.
Readit News
But you are right, there is a reporting part too to it. It's just that I think the sharing and data handling piece is the real key. There are many decent reporting solutions out there, none that integrates a serious data sharing/integration solution (I am also referring to data feeds from other systems, other painful topic). One other big topic is integration, companies do not know what an API is, so getting data out of systems usually requires jumping through different hoops of terrible UIs and button clicking.
But hey, if the topic sounds interesting for you and/or others, feel free to send me an email.
Strange they do not offer a more direct import. It would help the transition.
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en