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| Excelsior spreadsheet-generator | Examples | Pricing | Try or buy | Why modularise? | Press |
| Jocelyn Paine | |||||
Spreadsheet Factory is run by Jocelyn Paine. I consult on spreadsheet design, and especially on code-reuse. Spreadsheet developers often need to write "families" of spreadsheets, each spreadsheet doing some of the same calculations that all the others do, but also having its own unique features. This often happens when you are designing custom versions of a spreadsheet to suit the diverse needs of different clients. Version control can become a nightmare, because Excel gives you no way to share and re-use code between different spreadsheets. With the Excelsior spreadsheet generator, however, which I modestly claim is the world's first program for modularising spreadsheets, I think I can solve this problem.
I also consult on Web design; Artificial Intelligence; general software development; and scientific editing and reporting. Past clients include:
Version 1 of Excelsior is now for sale. Please see below for pricing and evaluation downloads and purchasing.
Excelsior is a compiler that converts programs written in the Excelsior programming language into Excel spreadsheets. Please see this link for examples. Excelsior programs consist of declarations for named tables, equations to calculate the tables' elements, and layout statements to say where the tables appear in your worksheets. The equations are Excel formulae, but using table names rather than cell addresses: names can be anything you like, making it easy to write readable code. Readability is further aided by the Literate Excelsior tool, which generates nicely formatted Web documents from your programs. By altering a few constants and layout statements, you can resize and move many tables at the same time, making it easy to generate different sizes and shapes of a spreadsheet. Programs can "recurse" over tables, making it possible to code things that are tricky to do directly in Excel. And Excelsior programs can be built by putting together modules which you have designed and tested independently, making it easy to reuse code.
Excelsior's benefits therefore are:
Excelsior is not a visual programming language: you drive the compiler from the command line, and you write and edit code in text files. It won't, therefore, suit many Excel end-users. However, the Excelsior language is small, and easy to learn if you know languages such as C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. It should, therefore, suit developers who for one reason or another have to produce spreadsheets and to keep adapting and reshaping them, whose spreadsheets must be well-documented and easily audited, and who have some programming experience.
Excelsior runs on Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista; please contact me if you want to run it on other versions of Windows or on other operating systems.
Commercial confidentiality prohibits me from showing Excelsior versions of the spreadsheets I'm currently working on. However, I have set up a small repository of examples on my personal site. These demonstrate what Excelsior source code looks like; the documentation that Excelsior automatically generates from this code; and the spreadsheets it generates.
A single-user licence for Excelsior costs £350.00. Please contact me if you are interested in multi-user licences.
I shall put up a free evaluation copy of Excelsior shortly. In the meantime, please contact me if you would like one.
Full versions are available at the price stated above. You can pay via PayPal, who will handle your payments safely and securely. Please contact me for other payment methods.
Once payment has been received, I will mail the full version of Excelsior to you, together with an invoice.