Ask IH: Excel export?
Ask IH: Excel export?
Hey fellow Indie Hackers 👋 Question for those of you running SaaS businesses:
Do you support the ability for your users to export to Excel?
I worked at a Fortune 500 for a decade and our users always wanted Excel export functionality. I wondered if y'all have seem the same needs expressed by your users...
Yes, but it is definitely worth it to ask what they are using it for. What are they doing in Excel that they can't do in your app? Is it functionality you can incorporate? Is it a new project idea?
Well said! Do you think Excel export facilitates a long tail of individualized use cases?
I wish I could tell you that I added the functionality to discover customer use cases, but I wasn't that clever. I just added it because it was requested by my users. But I think it can certainly be used as a sort of Use Case Discovery Tool. Makes me want to contact all my users that have used this feature.
We do csv export.
CSV exports :+1:
they might need to report or they might want to backup, I don't see any problem with it.
Yes! We make it standard that all our list views (i.e. list of contacts) have a download to csv option.
All our "download to csv" buttons just dump the current list (i.e. list all contacts, list contacts of status = new) with a header row and include all columns of data, even ones you don't often expose in the UI. (i.e create date in UTC)
It's a great response for users who request all kinds of other reports. I can say it has saved us many times and held off many distractions for the team to fulfill oddball report requests. Made it much easier for users to sort through their own data and create their own reports.
In our B2B SAAS App, if we cannot provide a nice UI/graph/report already, we compromise by providing customers a flat file/csv/excel export. They can do whatever with that data. Always a handy compromise.
What's the cost to you in building out and maintaining that CSV/Excel export functionality?
If there was a SaaS service that made that easier/faster/cheaper, would that be of interest to you?
As you're aware because of your F500 experience, Excel is the tool that people know how to use. I'm also in an F500 company and no matter what we build internally, everyone wants to export the data to Excel.
They even go so far as to export full DB pulls to Excel then complain about how slow Excel is to do anything. 🙄
It's a battle you won't win, so you might as well at least offer a CSV extract, if not a full Excel extract (if you're using PHP, PHP Excel is excellent for that).
You can build in every bit of functionality that they use Excel for, but there will always be people who want it exported. Where I'm at, the constant refrain from Mgrs is that they want people to stop using Excel so there's a single source of data, but in the next sentence, they're asking if we can add export capability. I suspect, people want Excel so they can manipulate the numbers before they pass it along to their leaders.
LOL yep! Been there, done that!
Building out Excel exports is schlep and I haven't met a dev that liked it :(
Would you find a SaaS offering that let devs shovel JSON in and get out a formatted Excel document a valuable offering?
No Excel library hassle. Less code to write/maintain. Give the users what they won't with minimum engineering investment...
What do you think?
Personally, I would not find that beneficial for a couple of reasons.
A) Anyone who would need to deal with the JSON and implementation, it'd be fairly easy to just use a framework and be done with it. THAT being said, I know on the PHP side, there are great frameworks that work fairly well in being able to create robust Excel documents. On the JS side, not so much, so there might be a little bit of a benefit there.
B) If your target market would be businesses, you'll find yourself in a flood of legal agreements concerning privacy, etc and you'll need to make sure your service architecture is very specific to each businesses needs. There's a good chance that anything being exported to Excel probably contains confidential business data.
C) If your target is to be a sub-SaaS service, ie a SaaS service would use your service to added that functionality that they don't necessarily want to/can build, then you'll still have the legal issues as B.
As I think about this, I have to wonder where the time/effort savings is. For example, I can feed you a JSON feed and get an Excel document back, but how is that Excel document formatted? I assume there'd be a way on your service where I define all of that formatting for the Excel document, but if I'm going to do that effort, why am I not just doing it with a framework and have better control over it?
Now, if you offer a "design" service where a business who needs Excel export gives you an Excel document and you create that format on your service for $xxx, THAT might have value for small/mid-sized companies. But I think you and I would both agree that you're probably not going to target large Fortune 500 companies for this type of service.
This was excellent feedback - thank you!
I was thinking as a sub-SaaS and I have no intention of directly targeting the Enterprise market. Blech!
My idea is specifically to be a sub-SaaS for niche/micro-SaaS offerings... Thereby providing a (hypothetically) valuable service without involving lawyers, contracts, and other enterprise-y stuff.
Would you please explain a little more about the "design" service idea you mentioned? Do you mean the business gives me a template, and then whenever they POST data, they get a spreadsheet built with their template+data?
Again, thanks for your time and thoughtful feedback!
I'd be prepared, if you're getting passed data from a SaaS, you may very well be involved in lawyers, etc because you're still handling company data. But for smaller sites, that might not be bad, but just have your security/privacy in place. ;-)
What I mean by a design service is partly to raise the question, I pass you data in JSON format that I'm getting back in an Excel document, but how is that document formatted? It is essentially a spreadsheet with data in columns? Not sure the value of that outside of the original SaaS just exporting a CSV.
So, that being said, offering a design service means you build the backend functionality to format a JSON feed into an Excel document that's highly formatted (column widths, borders, totals, etc) and looks like a professional report. You'd charge a fee to build out that "design" for each company that would want that, the origin SaaS could charge the fee with a margin for them before paying you.
If anyone is about to ask their users..
Don't just ask "would you like to have a CSV export?". People have opinions about everything. Ask specifically about a situation. They have to think about it, instead of telling you their opinion that CSV export could be useful.
I mean something like: "When was the last time you used an CSV export?"
we do export to CSV
Also depends on what service you offer.
Anything that holds my content, or user data, I would expect to download it in a friendly/common format. CSV is sufficient, usually?
We use a hosted service (Tito) for selling tickets, they provide the ability to download data/csv/excel of people who register for events. It would be wrong for them not to provide that.
I guess, also, this kind of stuff may need clarification in your privacy terms (?) GDPR and all that. I know, boring stuff :|
I was thinking of building a service that will let you POST JSON and return actual Excel XLSX documents.
The value proposition being reduced engineering time for something I suspect is a commonly requested feature. It's one less thing to operate/maintain for a feature which isn't really core to any SaaS (but probably something most/all B2B SaaS companies get request for...)
What do you think?
do you have an open API? or rather API in general (even for paid members)... It's always a hard redirection but I tend to lean on sending them to it. Not to say I always win the feature request, but if your clients are somewhat tech savvy they get it!
cause f*ck dealing with true excel exports. at most csv and add a tooltip that having MS Excel installed will open this format by default... #somefoodforthought
I definitely understand the pain of dealing with Excel documents! Even when your language has a decent library, it's a hassle :(
I was thinking of building a service that will let you POST JSON and return actual Excel XLSX documents.
The value proposition being reduced engineering time for a commonly requested feature. Plus it's one less piece of infra to operate for a feature which isn't really core functionality for any SaaS but is probably something users want in almost every B2B SaaS.
Does that sound valuable to you?
oh that works!! I forget the new MS Office docs are XML based or some variation of it!
So ya having an endpoint that returns XLSX as a data format is clean! I digs!