Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms

In a previous blog, we wrote about the competitive edge that data-rich financial institutions and solution vendors can gain by offering ‘Data-as-a-Service‘.

But what are some of the key considerations when it comes to cloud-enabling a firm’s existing legacy platforms? How difficult is it to offer live data or real-time data sharing through commonly used desktop apps such as Excel?

A bank, broker or asset manager might want to take on-premise data that sits on an internal platform – trade data for example – and seamlessly share that to the cloud, thus removing the need for end users to be onsite or to remote desktop in via a VPN.

Or a solution vendor with products designed for on-premise installation or access via dedicated lines and specific client software, might wish to go cloud-based in order to offer real-time or on-demand data sharing into existing applications and workflows without its customers having to rely on clunky FTP or building to APIs.

The good news is that enabling Data-as-a-Service on these legacy platforms is not as difficult as it might seem.

Enabling Data-as-a-Service on Legacy Platforms –

Real-time data sharing in the real world

Amongst financial institutions, many firms, on both the buy side and the sell side, are looking to gain greater leverage from their own internal systems by cloud-enabling them, thus improving the service they offer to internal colleagues and external clients. Whether that’s through making real-time data available within chat and collaborative workflow apps, feeding live data to and from Excel or sharing data via other desktop apps, there are many benefits that such an approach offers.

A good real-world example of this is the e-commerce fixed income department of a well-known bank, which uses its own internally-developed platform to generate trade axes from its current bond inventory. Working together with ipushpull, the bank has cloud-enabled this internal platform with secure, real-time data sharing, so that customers are automatically updated with new trade axes via their own choice of desktop apps (such as Symphony or Excel) and can respond with indications of interest directly from within those apps.

From a solution vendor perspective, there are many companies that have fantastic products and services, but live data sharing is restricted by the fact that their customers need to have software installed onsite or can only access data through FTP or API integration with a centralised service. A number of these vendors are now seeing the benefits of cloud-enabling these platforms to offer Data-as-a-Service.

Again, it’s worth citing a couple of real-world examples.

The first is a risk solution vendor that offers intra-day margin calculations. They have a great product that enables customers to load up their position data and calculate span margining for those positions on the fly. However, the product was originally designed to be installed on premise at the customer’s site, which made it expensive and meant that it could only be sold to larger institutions. By working with ipushpull to create a multi-tenant version with a secure cloud presentation layer, the vendor can broaden the service out to a wider, more diverse customer base and offer more affordable subscription-based or on-demand pricing models.

The second example is a data vendor that has a centralised multi-tenant platform, where customers download large data files and upload trade files via secure FTP. Again, their legacy installation and onboarding process meant that their commercial model was limited to larger customers. ipushpull helped the vendor cloud-enable this service to make the data available on demand, which has now opened up the service to a much wider group of potential customers.

Seamless integration of data sharing tools

The common thread with all of these legacy systems is that they handle data, with a set of inputs and outputs. And there is no fundamental, technical reason why they should not be cloud-enabled with data sharing tools.

This is what ipushpull does. At the front end, we deliver these systems as true services with a unified presentation layer via the common desktop apps that people are already using. At the back end we develop APIs that plug into these legacy technologies. From the perspective of both service providers and end users, this is a completely seamless process. Services connect to ipushpull via the cloud and we take care of the rest, i.e. marshalling the data, providing access controls, presenting the data into multiple desktop apps and marshalling data back and forth to the service from within those apps in real-time.

Service providers benefit from not only being able to offer live and on-demand access through desktop apps like Excel, Slack, Symphony, Microsoft Teams and Eikon messenger, desktop containers like ChartIQ Finsemble and Openfin, and internal platforms and applications like pricing engines, risk systems and OMSs, without have to completely re-platform their existing systems, but also being able to deliver data-driven custom notifications into those apps based upon user-defined parameters.

In summary, Data-as-a-Service offers many benefits, and there is no reason that firms should be restricted to on-premise deployment or to API/SFTP integration. By working with a trusted partner such as ipushpull, firms that are looking to cloud-enable their internal platforms can minimise their internal development costs, broaden their reach and rapidly accelerate their time to market.

Download “Fintech’s Next Frontier: Data-as-a-Service” our Financial Markets Insights report. In collaboration with Natwest Markets, Maystreet, Euromoney TRADEDATA and Engine, part of The Investment Association, ipushpull explores the importance of Data-as-a-Service in facilitating remote working and accelerating digital initiatives within the financial markets industry.

June 3, 2020July 2, 2020

How can data-rich financial institutions and vendors provide ‘Data-as-a-Service’ to their clients?

Banks, inter-dealer brokers, funds and financial data vendors maintain unique, and in many cases live, data sets. This data could provide a competitive edge to clients if it could be easily shared with them

It has become something of a truism that data is a valuable commodity in today’s economy. Particularly so in the financial markets sector, where the quality and timeliness of the data can have such a massive impact on the outcome of trading and investment decisions.

Data-rich firms, such as banks producing trade axes, inter-dealer brokers making prices, commodities firms quoting spreads, reference data firms providing the latest symbology and market risk analytics platforms sharing risk metrics are therefore in a strong position. Financial market participants are hungry for unique, high-quality, accurate and timely live and on-demand data, and willing to pay a premium if it gives them a competitive edge.

Increasingly however, end clients are looking for their counterparts, vendor and service providers to offer more data. They want a better user experience by being able to access live data on-demand, and to be able to easily access and integrate the data within their existing applications and workflows, with minimum disruption. They also want more flexibility to pay only for what they use rather than being forced to subscribe to large data sets.

These demands can be tough for data producers to meet. But for those able to rise to the challenge, many opportunities can open up in terms of new services they can offer, new business models they can capitalise on, and new types of clients that they might not otherwise be able to service.

Living in the past

The traditional model of live data delivery to end users in the financial markets sector – still prevalent at the majority of financial institutions – is via dedicated desktop applications or browser-based services where, with the appropriate licence agreements, users can access the relevant data and where specific functionality is provided within those desktop or browser applications to view and work with the data.

This is all well and good but somewhat restrictive from the end-user’s perspective. Sales and Traders generally use a range of core applications in their daily workflow, such as various pricing & analytics tools, spreadsheets such as Excel, and chat apps such as Bloomberg IB chat, Eikon Messenger and Symphony, for example.

The problem arises when they want to work with live data using these core tools rather than those offered by the data producer (that’s if the data producer even offers such tools). Typically, there’s no easy way to connect the former with the latter, so generally they have to rely on inefficient or expensive ways to get the necessary data into their own applications, ranging from copy and paste between applications (prone to error and no longer real-time) or downloading CSV files (very clunky), to building API connections (very expensive), with only the latter offering anything close to live data or real-time automation. So what’s the alternative you may ask?

Data-as-a-Service

In response to growing demand for more accessible data (exacerbated by covid related remote working) , data producers and service providers are increasingly looking at how to offer “Data-as-a-Service”(DaaS). But they need to be more intelligent than just providing users with access to a massive database and giving them the ability to select the subsets of data that they want over existing channels.

As its name suggests, DaaS is not just about the Data component. Data producers need to give equal – or even greater – weight to the ‘Service’ element, as this is where they can really differentiate themselves. Particularly as a younger generation of millennials are now entering positions of seniority within firms, with higher digital demands than the old guard. In the B2C world, these “digital natives”have become used to accessing the information they want, when they want it, in their chosen format, on their own device, and to be able to immediately act on it. Increasingly, they expect their B2B providers to offer similar levels of service.

With the right DaaS approach, data producers can satisfy these demands, to really set themselves apart and capitalise on this changing dynamic. But there are three key challenges they need to overcome:

First, they need to make it a lot easier for clients to pull data from data producers into their own core applications, without having to resort to significant – and potentially costly – API development or working with flat files.

Second, they need to build value-added services around two-way data flow, where clients are not just consuming their data, but acting on it and sending data such as prices or bot commands back from their own core apps.

Third, they need to adapt their business models to reflect what is happening in the B2C world, because this is increasingly what clients want, e.g. tiered subscriptions or usage-based licences, rather than an all-or-nothing approach.

Data-as-a-Service enablement

In the past, building these types of DaaS capabilities would have incurred significant development, particularly if the data producer relies on legacy technologies for its own data collection, storage, normalisation and distribution.

Fortunately, DaaS-enabling technology now exists that makes it possible for data producers to achieve all of this without having to re-architect their own data platforms.

ipushpull, for example, enables data producers to rapidly connect their service to a cloud-based platform and deliver standardised two-way interfaces and plug-ins into popular client desktop, chat and workflow apps used within the Financial Markets sector. Combining this with features such as data-driven notifications delivered into those same apps (so that the user is automatically alerted when key events occur), ipushpull can offer a genuinely new and superior client experience.

The benefits to this approach are significant not only for external data producers but for delivering in-house data and functionality internally as a service in the same way.

In-house systems can leverage this approach across a wide range of use cases by improving live risk, position and P&L monitoring across desktop and mobile apps, syndication desks seamlessly sharing flow to sales desks or speeding up trade exception management, for example. Data and service providers, as well as gaining a fast and cost-effective way to deliver data to their clients, also benefit by being able to offer more commercial flexibility and a far better user experience to their clients. And by being able to both push and pull data to and from their clients, they gain greater insights that enable them to develop new services around data sharing, data enrichment and workflow automation, for example.

By embracing this powerful, agile new approach to DaaS, data-rich financial institutions and vendors can now adopt more flexible commercial models while keeping ahead of the ever increasing demands of their clients.

April 7, 2020April 8, 2020

Data Connectivity Essential For Remote Work

Extracted from the article “Data Connectivity essential for remote work” by Shanny Basar.

Matthew Cheung, CEO of ipushpull, said there had been an increase in interest in the company’s ability to provide live data sharing as more staff are working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cheung told Markets Media: “The cloud has a couple of silver linings. As more people are working remotely, firms want the ability to share data in real-time while maintaining their institutional controls over access.”

London-based ipushpull allows users to securely share data in real-time across desktop applications, databases, messaging platforms and cloud services.

Cloud technology

The Data-as-a-Service platform was launched three years ago and allows data to be easily shared using cloud technology.

“Cloud deployment was a big challenge in capital markets,”Cheung added. “An enormous tanker started slowly turning three years ago at a slow pace and has picked up speed in the last 12 months.”

He predicted there will be an acceleration in deployment of the cloud in the next nine to 12 months, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused staff to work from remote locations while still needing access to real-time data.

In capital markets ipushpull has initially focussed on non-exchange traded assets that require manual processes. For example, when dealers make prices for options in Excel spreadsheets and then have to copy and paste the information into emails for distribution. ipushpull has been used by an interdealer-broker to automate this process by uploading the excel data into the cloud so it can be shared live it in various formats such via chat or an API.

“We make the data interoperable enabling live collaboration,”added Cheung.

Data-as-a-Service

Financial institutions such as NatWest Markets and data vendors such as Euromoney Tradedata use ipushpull to deliver data direct to their clients.

To learn more about Data-as-a-Service and how institutions are utilising the ipushpull platform read the full Markets Media article by Shanny Basar.

…

April 3, 2018April 4, 2018

What’s new in the Spring release of ipushpull?

Live collaboration between applications, live charts, and multi-tiled workspaces

NEW EXCEL ADD-IN

The new release of the ipushpull Excel Add-in is easier to use and importantly allows you to share live charts! The ipushpull Excel Add-in allows you to collaborate in real-time with other desktop Excel users while also connecting to other applications such as the ipushpull Web App, interactive web pages or chat applications like Symphony and Slack.

WEB APP & EMBEDDED PAGES UPDATE

With the new version of ipushpull you can now copy and paste data directly into the Web App from other applications making ipushpull even easier to use. You can also now display live updating charts and other live content in the ipushpull Web App, in connected applications or embedded in your WordPress site or other website.

WORKSPACES IN BETA LAUNCH

ipushpull is excited to launch Workspaces to our beta testing customers. Rather than switching between pages in your ipushpull Web App, you can now view multiple pages as tiles in a configurable live Workspace, retaining all the features of the ipushpull Web App.

Workspaces also allows new content types to be displayed such as live updating charts generated from our new Excel add-in, PDFs or presentations, and even live streaming audio or video. Everything you need in one manageable space with the same reliable permissions.

November 9, 2017November 9, 2017

Share spreadsheets into Slack – app takes data interoperability to the next level

In a recent blog we highlighted that if chat and collaboration platforms are looking to replace email then ipushpull is positioned to replace file attachments and file sharing.

In the past few years, driven by version control frustrations, email fatigue, security concerns and the desire for faster, more interactive communication, the sharing of information via email is increasingly being overshadowed by a growing range of collaboration tools.

This space is occupied by a combination of familiar tech heavyweights together with specialist collaboration app providers where Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook compete with the likes of Slack, Symphony and Atlassian’s Stride.

The development of this new set of messaging and collaboration applications offers new channels for ipushpull‘s real-time data interoperability for end users in applications they already use. ipushpull is one of the first providers to really push to the limit the capabilities of these new collaboration tools, making it easy to share spreadsheets into Slack and Symphony along with other data.

In recent years, Slack has become one of the most popular and established applications in the chat space and has seen incredible growth with 6 million active daily users. It offers cross-team channels, private groups and 1-to-1 direct messages for messaging as well as file sharing.

However, even though Slack allows spreadsheets to be uploaded on the go, there is still no way to view them in the app itself. For sharing data from Excel spreadsheets, this can be a big drawback introducing the common problems of version control and collaboration difficulties associated with files. While users of Google Sheets still have to jump out of Slack (and thus context switch) to see their data, leaving ipushpull as the only app on the market that allows users to share spreadsheets into Slack.

How to share spreadsheets into Slack with ipushpull

Until now there has been no way to view selected ranges of data from spreadsheets within the Slack chat platform. ipushpull‘s Slack app offers just this – the ability to pull a selected range of data from a live spreadsheet directly into a Slack channel whether that’s a snapshot, live data or streaming data, in a secure encrypted form, so everyone on the channel can view and collaborate on the very latest information.

The ipushpull Slack app can support a wide range of use cases where customers have a need to share data in a secure way. Static, live or streaming data may be shared within the channel manually or via simple ipushpull Slack bots. Let’s explore a couple of use cases to explain how this functionality can be used.

Snapshot, or static, data

Snapshot data maybe shared manually or automatically when certain user-defined criteria are met. For example, a manager of a chain of retail stores may share sales data with management or staff by copying and pasting data into a chat channel, instead they can improve scalability and efficiency of their service by using a bot (also provided by ipushpull of course) to share the current state of sales or automatically alert management when a sales target is hit. All from a spreadsheet connected to Slack via ipushpull.

Live data

Live data enables someone in a team, working in a collaborative way, to make updates to data in their Excel spreadsheet, or local database, for example, and have that automatically – in real time – update in the ‘team’ Slack channel. For example, a multi-national enterprise, with a bid team working in diverse locations, can use the chat and ipushpull to collaborate on a financial model in a spreadsheet with changes reflected in real time within the Slack channel. The ‘no files’ model combined with the use of live data ensures the model is maintained in a single version and is always up to date.

Share data in Slack

Streaming data

Streaming data allows a real-time ‘ticking’ feed of data to be viewed in Slack. For example, whether monitoring the US stock market or live sporting results from one of ipushpull‘s streaming ‘public’ pages, or providing access to ‘in-house’ private streaming data in manufacturing or health sectors, ipushpull delivers the ability to share true real-time updates in fast changing environments where access to up-to-the-second information makes all the difference.

These use cases demonstrate just some of the ways ipushpull’s chat integrations can be used to enhance and improve workflow and communication within organisations. And with the recent launch of shared channels within Slack, which support intra-company collaboration, there will be many more to come.

So chat is great – but it takes more than just chat to make real improvements in business efficiency. That’s why ipushpull is focussed on taking chat to the next level.

Co-author: John Eccleston

April 10, 2017November 19, 2018

Excel spreadsheets to WordPress in One Click

The popularity of the ipushpull plug-in for WordPress has been going strong for nearly 2 years which is why ipushpull is ranked number 1 on Google for “Excel to WordPress” and “Excel to websites”. Use of the plugin is far and wide with a variety of companies from different industries all pushing data from Excel spreadsheets to WordPress and webpages. From financial market traders to sports clubs, what our customers have in common is the need to get data in their spreadsheets to the web, and one of the many features of ipushpull does exactly that.

Displaying live data from Excel spreadsheets in WordPress has simplified several aspects of our customers’ businesses, examples of which include:

Sharing live sports results for a diverse range of sports clubs
Real-time sharing of data in financial services
Displaying daily work rotas and shift s
Displaying live inventory data on a mobile device
Linking internal databases to your website and remote Excel users

As you can see, the ways in which the ipushpull plugin is used has been as diverse as the companies themselves. The platform is very flexible by design, which means data embedded in a WordPress website can be public or private, updating live every second or manually once a month. There is no development needed. For each page an embedded code is generated and can be used in WordPress or any other web building platform.

Since the plugin has proved so popular with a lot of our customers, we have decided to add some of the following new features: the new Shortcode Generator in WordPress, the ability to download published tables and embed from CVS files, give even more functionality and ease of use.

Better ways to embed live data from Excel spreadsheets in WordPress

The new ipushpull button to the WordPress menu means you can insert spreadsheet data to your web page by selecting it in drop down menus, which generates a ‘shortcode’. The shortcode creates a link between the data and your web page. This quick solution allows you to embed your spreadsheets without the need to search for cumbersome workarounds, literally at the click of a button! How great is that?

The other handy new feature is the ability to download live ipushpull data into Excel from your website. Maybe you need to run some data analysis, ipushpull lets you do so with live data from your website straight to Excel. As the data updates on the web page, so does your Excel spreadsheet.

Want to share CSV files on your WordPress web page or website? We can do that too! Since CSV files can be uploaded to our platform, they can also easily be embedded in WordPress. A user can specify to automatically Pull data from the CSV file once a day at a set time or update it manually. If you would like to find out more about this or any feature, please contact support@ipushpull.com or fill out our contact form.

Start using the ipushpull plugin to get Excel spreadsheets to WordPress by downloading it from the WordPress website. Create a free trial ipushpull account to start embedding live data in your website today.

Are you using the ipushpull plugin for WordPress in your business? Write to us with some details for a chance to appear in on of our blog articles.

March 22, 2017November 19, 2018

Live Data from Excel to WordPress – Trading, Price lists, Rankings, Schedules…

ipushpull is a cloud based data sharing platform that connects desktop Excel to websites, webapps and cloud services. Our number 1 ranked WordPress plugin lets you display live Excel data onto the web. From there you can choose whether you want to share it privately with other ipushpull users or share it with everyone by embedding it into your website. It’s easy for those wanting to share Excel to WordPress as our handy WordPress plugin helps build the shortcode for you.

Although ipushpull was created to get live futures trading data onto a mobile device, the uses of the platform have been wide ranging. Keep reading to see how creative ipushpull users have been in finding alternative uses for our unique technology, including leader boards, schedules, retail price lists and even rankings.

Excel to WordPress for Trading

Golden Algo

A former Bangalore Stock Exchange member has set up algorithmic trading strategies for stocks, futures, and commodities markets. As the algorithms run, using Excel as a calculation tool, they use ipushpull to display the live market signals onto their website. This provides the most up to date data. Golden Algo have been happy to use ipushpull and said that they are ‘grateful and appreciate your prompt and quick support’.

Check out their page:

Excel to WordPress for Leader Boards

Quality Racing Sim-dicate

As the sanctioning body for two of the most popular iRacing leagues, QRS keeps track of the latest results. For the Continental Endurance Sports Car Series, they use ipushpull to display the live team and driver results of the different types of cars, with their car number, position, name, points and race location in real time on their website.

Excel to WordPress for Schedules

Lifeguard University

Lifeguard University is a certified lifeguard training program provider offering free resources, rescue skills, and certified training. They use ipushpull for their scheduling system so that everyone can have easy access to it on the web. They currently use it to show the U.S. Olympic Trials Swimming schedule.

Excel to WordPress for Retail Price Lists

Bluffton Rentco Tool & Equipment Rental

A rental company based in Bluffton Indiana rents out equipment from brick pavers to bouncy castles. The rental prices vary for 4 hours, overnight, 24 hours, and weekly rentals of equipment. To be able to maintain and easily display the prices, Bluffton Rentco uses ipushpull to display their Excel spreadsheets of rental pricing lists and embed them into their WordPress site. Any changes Bluffton Rentco make to their pricing on Excel, automatically updates their website.

Excel to WordPress for Rankings

Aviation Focused STEM Program

A company that runs a Pietenpol building program in which they bring together builders with mentors. This unique company teaches members how to create EAA 690 aircrafts with a wood and fabric airframe. Participants are then able to work on builds to earn credits that count towards their payment for flight training in the future. To keep track of the total credits earned and the total credits remaining for each builder, they use a spreadsheet. With ipushpull they are able to display that spreadsheet onto their website so all the builders are able to see how many more hours they need to work, to attain their flight training. What a great idea!

If you think that ipushpull might be useful to you, get in touch so we can help! Are you already embedding data in your website through our platform? Get in touch to get featured on our website.

March 16, 2017March 16, 2017

No More Slacking….Microsoft Teams Launches To Office 365 Users

Microsoft Teams is no longer in soft launch or ‘customer preview’ as the $500 billion company likes to call it. As of now, Teams is included in the Enterprise and Small Business versions of Office 365. During its soft launch the collaboration platform managed to attract more than 50,000 companies (including Accenture, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia and Sage to name a few) and have added over 100 new features and integrations which include bots, ability to email channels and audio calling from mobile devices. Also including a host of other features pointing to the technology trend of convergence.

Why the mad rush to get Teams out to market? Well the answer is Slack, the white hot collaboration platform that is the fastest growing business application ever. With 5 million users Slack isn’t afraid of the the 40 year old incumbent demonstrated by its brazen NY Times advert back in November.

Sun Tzu – The Supreme Art Of War Is To Subdue Slack And Launch Teams Without Fighting

However, it looks like Microsoft’s strategy is not to directly target Slack users but to pick up Office 365 users (all 85 million of them) who do not use Slack or any other similar applications – something we picked up on in our previous blog on Microsoft Teams back in November.

Since then the workspace collaboration platform market continues to heat up with Google recently reigniting ‘Hangouts‘, bringing in integrations with Google Apps such as Sheets and Docs as well as natural language parsing bots (something Microsoft is also doing) and Workplace by Facebook (previously called Facebook at Work) is quietly gaining users. Gartner research predicts that globally businesses will spend $5.1 billion in 2017 on collaboration, conferencing and social tools.

There is also Symphony which rarely gets a mention in the same space as Slack because of its major focus on financial market participants. Might be one to watch as back in 2015 Google was part of a $100 million investment round into Symphony. Perhaps Google’s plan is to integrate Google Apps like Sheets and Docs into Symphony in order to break into financial institutions who are all huge enterprise users of Microsoft Office?

On Your Marks……And They’re Off!

2017 will be an interesting year – which company can innovate faster and gain more traction?

Slack was first off and has even upped a gear to appeal to enterprise users by offering the ‘Grid’ (perhaps they are concerned about the competition). Teams is free to its own Office 365 user base, which if Microsoft can crack gives the perfect entry point into the 1.2 billion desktop users Microsoft is pushing to the cloud (an area where revenues have doubled over the last quarter).

With ipushpull ‘s vision of live data interoperability between all apps, whether desktop or web, our integrations with Slack, Symphony and Microsoft Teams mean whichever way the wind blows we can play an increasing role in this fast growing collaborative market.

Watch this space…..

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017

Top 5 workflow tools – supercharge your Excel and spreadsheets

Microsoft Excel‘s entrenched position as the most popular business tool owes a great deal to its breadth of functionality and flexibility. Over the years Excel users, from small businesses to financial professionals, have found that they’ve been able to turn its power to solve a huge range of challenges. However, many people are also using Excel for purposes that it isn’t suited for. I’d hazard a guess that every business has at least one critical spreadsheet that has spiraled out of control over time to the point where no one fully understands how it works, making it difficult to collaborate on. So we’ve come up with the top 5 workflow tools for Excel to help you overcome this problem.

Many fully-featured spreadsheet competitors to Excel have been launched with varying degrees of success, including Google Sheets and Zoho Sheet. However, for this article we’ve compiled products that solve self-contained problems – the kind of challenges that people have used Excel for, even though that’s not what it was designed to do.

Smartsheet – the project management tool

Even the smallest business needs a tool for managing employees’ time and tracking the progress of projects. For many years Microsoft Project has set the gold standard for this purpose, but it’s expensive and far too complex. Consequently, many businesses have gone back to using Excel for scheduling and time-tracking, which has given way to version control problems arising from spreadsheets being shared between multiple users.

Enter Smartsheet – a web-based project management tool with a spreadsheet-inspired interface. It’s taken the best features of Excel and Microsoft Project, added new features like notifications and real-time reporting and presented them in a powerful but simple-to-use online package. It has no version control problems that Excel files have and it automates many of the manual workarounds. It does this without the steep learning curve of Microsoft Project, that’s why it’s in our top 5 workflow tools. Simple enough for small businesses and powerful enough for large enterprises, it counts Netflix, Bayer and Accenture among its customers.

AbleBits Suite – the timesaving tool for Excel

If you’ve recently had to merge large tables in Excel or remove duplicates then this painstaking, fiddly process is fresh in your mind. It can take up a large chunk of your time, time you could have spent doing something a lot more productive than squinting at cells one by one. Ablebits delights everyone who completes these tasks day to day with their suite of Excel add-ons, taking away the manual chores that plague Excel. To name a few of the tools, Merge Tables Wizard does exactly what it says on the tin. If you think that you could merge tables even without this tool, then you should try working with bigger tables. Advanced Find and Replace Tool gives a lot more flexibility and allows to search inside notes, formulas and even all the sheets in your workbook. If you need to Remove Duplicates and Trim Spaces or just Fill Empty Cells, they’ve got the tool for you. All in they have 10 add-ons that incorporate a variety of useful task automations.

iPushPull – share and manage Excel data tool

Most businesses have critical data with functions to analyse it held in multiple Excel files. If they want to share this data across their businesses or with clients and customers they have to send entire files as email attachments or manually upload them using services like Dropbox. This inevitably leads to version control and security problems. It’s rare that these sheets get redeveloped as standalone applications – business requirements keep changing and there’s limited budget or desire to do so.

The iPushPull cloud service lets you share data ranges directly from desktop Excel and access them in other spreadsheets, on the web, on mobile and in other applications like Slack and Symphony. As your spreadsheet data changes, it automatically updates everywhere else. It’s the perfect tool for aggregating sales and finance data from multiple sites across organisations. With this live collaboration tool you can distribute information to customers or clients without leaving Excel, with built-in permissions and auditing to control who views or modifies the data.

Workday Worksheets – forecasting and planning for enterprises tool

This new addition to the host of Workday process management and planning tools, creates a new way to reconcile the forecasting and budgeting process for financial services. The original app is a collaborative tool for organisations to share live data and manage spreadsheets, and even has a chat interface. It gives enterprises a more adequate solution to working with spreadsheets than Excel. The Worksheets application looks great as a standalone tool, but you have to migrate to the Workday platform. A subscription to which is quite pricey, therefore making it more viable for large companies such as enterprises. The app isn’t directly integrated with Excel but spreadsheets can be uploaded to Worksheets.

OpenasApp – turn your sheets into mobile apps tool

Anyone who’s tried to open a full-sized spreadsheet on a mobile device will know that the user experience is not great. Finding the data you’re looking for is time-consuming, involves lots of swiping, pinching and zooming. Trying to manipulate the data or perform calculations is even more difficult. The new offering from OpenasApp lets you transform your spreadsheet data into an interactive mobile app. You select tables of data from your spreadsheet and use OpenasApp’s wizard to create your app. It attempts to work out what kind of data you have selected, and automatically generates graphs and charts using its built-in BI functionality. It even lets you integrate simple calculations into your new web app (unfortunately it doesn’t support macros yet). It’s a new product so it’s yet to be seen how popular it will prove, but we’ve put it in our top 5 workflow tools because its ability to create web apps on-demand using your existing business data is very attractive.

As a result of its functionality and flexibility, Excel has outgrown its original purpose. So there’s an increasing range of products and tools to help customers make their spreadsheets better such as the top 5 workflow tools we’ve described above. If you have a favourite tool that’s improved or replaced your spreadsheets, please tell us! And if you’d like a free trial of iPushPull, please sign up here today.

December 22, 2016February 23, 2017

Tech trends 2017: Convergence – Not the movie

Convergence. Sounds like the title of a dodgy b-movie, doesn’t it? And it is. In fact, there are several. But I’m not concerned with badly-scripted, straight-to-streaming films today. Convergence is one of the hottest subjects in tech press at the moment, particularly in the area of cloud services and productivity tools. For tech trends 2017: convergence is likely to remain there and here’s why.

Some are euphemistically calling it a bundling event, which sounds like a Black Friday sale at Walmart, but it amounts to the same thing: implement or acquire exactly the same features as everyone else and force them into your core product. In other words, the tech equivalent of a huddle of hipsters hanging-out in the same Dalston dive and choosing to assert their individuality by growing exactly the same beard.

Dropbox announced their new suite of productivity tools, which amount to a loosely-related collection of features that have been cherry-picked from the likes of Evernote, Office 365, Quip and others.

Slack integrated voice calling into their product earlier this year, just in time for Microsoft to announce Teams, which is essentially Slack with voice and video calling (as noted by CEO Stewart Butterfield in a full-page ad in the New York Times). In a move that surprised nobody, Slack responded this week with the addition of video calling (sadly lacking the very useful screen-sharing facility in Teams). Incidentally, both of these products look a lot like Yammer, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft.

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to keep up. You might argue that this sort of product convergence is good for competition and consumer choice; I can see that argument too. The problem for end-users is, when every product claims to do everything for everyone, how do we choose the right one?

Tech trends 2017: Convergence or integration?

Convergence is just another way of saying the current trend in tech is to value convenience over function. If it continues, we will simply end up with a selection of cloud-based multi-tools and users will find themselves choosing between the digital equivalent of a tin-opener attachment or the tool for removing stones from horse’s hooves.

The trouble is, as anyone who has ever tried to fix the car with a Leatherman or put up a shelf using a Swiss Army Knife will know, these general-purpose tools will only get you so far. They are fine for simple tasks, but bigger projects require more specialised and sophisticated tools to get the job done well.

It’s a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to perform some serious financial analysis using an online spreadsheet (assuming you’ve solved the not-insignificant problem of accessing the data you need in the cloud), or do something as simple as generate a table of contents in the online version of Microsoft Word.

When it comes to technology, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; integration is. At iPushPull, we are striving to bring together the tools you know, whether on desktop or mobile, with the accessibility of the cloud. We don’t believe convenience has to come at the cost of function, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the view that you need to give up the powerful, fully-featured applications you need in order to be productive.

The list of tools we are integrated with is expanding continuously, and now includes Slack, WordPress, Microsoft Teams, PDFs and of course Excel. You can chat in Slack with your team while viewing live updating data, host it on your WordPress website, or simply view live data on your mobile with our platform.

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