However, in my opinion, you need different examples to show the strengths of this app. A lot of the examples on your page look kinda clunky and error-prone to me, and better solved with a spreadsheet.
Take the "personal finance" one. The "total expenses" row lists out all the expenses adding them out one at a time. In a spreadsheet you'd just type =sum(A1:A5). Imagine it wasn't just 5 but 20 items. Now your sum gets pretty unweildy. How confident can you be from looking at that sum that you haven't missed one of the expense items? In a spreadsheet you know pretty clearly that =sum(A1:A20) has all those rows. Better still, if you insert a row to add another item, it'll update the sum for you.
The "Investment returns" sheet is another example. What if I wanted to extend that to 30 years? In a spreadsheet I'd just copy the last row and past it in the the next 10 cells and I'm done. Here's I have to paste it 10 times, and then manually update each row and hope I didn't make a typo anywhere. What if I didn't want my savings to be constant but assume that I'm going to increase savings a year over time?
The unit conversion is somewhat neat though, so maybe examples that use that a bit more?
Thanks great feedback and completely agree about the clunkiness around sums!
As a mitigation I did add row highlighting (if you hover over a var it'll highlight the row it was defined at), but the underlying problem of dynamic sums is still there.
I was working on a TOTAL() function (which someone also mentioned in this thread), but conceptually I also think some of the calcs are better in a tabular format, so have been toying around with designs with tables etc.
Comments
Congrats on building and launching your app.
However, in my opinion, you need different examples to show the strengths of this app. A lot of the examples on your page look kinda clunky and error-prone to me, and better solved with a spreadsheet.
Take the "personal finance" one. The "total expenses" row lists out all the expenses adding them out one at a time. In a spreadsheet you'd just type =sum(A1:A5). Imagine it wasn't just 5 but 20 items. Now your sum gets pretty unweildy. How confident can you be from looking at that sum that you haven't missed one of the expense items? In a spreadsheet you know pretty clearly that =sum(A1:A20) has all those rows. Better still, if you insert a row to add another item, it'll update the sum for you.
The "Investment returns" sheet is another example. What if I wanted to extend that to 30 years? In a spreadsheet I'd just copy the last row and past it in the the next 10 cells and I'm done. Here's I have to paste it 10 times, and then manually update each row and hope I didn't make a typo anywhere. What if I didn't want my savings to be constant but assume that I'm going to increase savings a year over time?
The unit conversion is somewhat neat though, so maybe examples that use that a bit more?
Thanks great feedback and completely agree about the clunkiness around sums!
As a mitigation I did add row highlighting (if you hover over a var it'll highlight the row it was defined at), but the underlying problem of dynamic sums is still there.
I was working on a TOTAL() function (which someone also mentioned in this thread), but conceptually I also think some of the calcs are better in a tabular format, so have been toying around with designs with tables etc.