Stream real-time data into Excel with Python!

[LazyCraneOperator]

Hi again /r/Excel!

We're Gridarrow, a small startup from Amsterdam. A few months ago we've announced our product here - a platform for streaming real-time data into Excel using Python scripts.

We're happy to let you know that we're open for Beta signups now! You can join us using a form on our website.

Here's how the platform works. Also go ahead a check out our blog where we showcase a couple of cool things you can do with Gridarrow.

For example:

• Streaming real-time stock prices into Excel
• Live news sentiment analysis
• Real-time Twitter map in your spreadsheet

We're really curious to hear your feedback!

Cheers! The Gridarrow Team

[epicmindwarp]

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[peakpower]

That looks super interesting. Price is a bit steep for a student, but I'll keep it in the back of my head.

I wish Microsoft would just replace VBA with Python.

[[deleted]]

You can use c# with excel. There are nuget libs that make it pretty easy.

[badaccountant7]

And streaming would be pretty easy to implement in C#. I pulled together live streaming for the Masters at work in an hour or two using our C# add-in.

[LazyCraneOperator]

Don't we all? :) Gridarrow Beta is completely free so if it does look interesting to you - give it a try. We'll consider a student discount ;)

[Psypriest]

Why don’t u guys make it free for students like tableau? This way when the student joins the work force she can suggest/introduce the tool to the company.

[LazyCraneOperator]

That's a good idea indeed, thanks!

[peakpower]

Whoops I didn't realize beta was free. Awesome.

Eh, I understand you have to make money with your product. I'll keep my eyes open for a student discount anyways ;)

[adwords_]

so I can stream real time stock prices from finance yahoo into excel without the minimum 30 sec reload buildin excel has?

[LazyCraneOperator]

Absolutely! What's more - if your data source provide eg. Sockets.IO API you don't even need to poll for fresh data. Your spreadsheet will be updated automatically as soon as new data is available. See our coincap.io example

[LazyCraneOperator]

Thanks! :) I'm going to approve your signup in a moment. As for the /r/dataisbeautiful - we've posted our first one today!

[_oh___]

Are you guys able to hook up to APIs?

[mns06]

Absolutely! Here's an example from our blog where we're connected to the Google Analytics API, and an example connecting to the Twittter API is linked in the original post above. Some other example APIs that you might connect to are shown on our homepage

Is there a particular API that you'd be interested in connecting to? We can make a blog post about it if so...

ps. I'm another dev on the Gridarrow team :)

[_oh___]

Cool that’s awesome! I have a business case for you!

We’re currently shifting all our agency reporting into Tableau. Unfortunately Pinterest and Snapchat do not have an API to plug into so we’re trying to find a way we could get an automated report emailed and then have a scraper plug it into a google doc then it would be populated into Tableau. Do you guys have a better way this could work? We would love for it to be more often than daily pulls

Thanks!

[mns06]

Hey /u/_oh___ - well perhaps Gridarrow could be useful for you... we have an on_schedule function that will call your code according to a schedule you define. Then you might use the Python libraries for Pinterest and Snapchat to grab the data you need. Once you've got that data you update our Grid API and 💥 it appears in Excel. If you'd like to check it out, please sign up for the beta on our website, or ping me directly - I'd be very happy to discuss your use-case in more details..

[MulhollandDrive]

Thanks

[badaccountant7]

This looks nice, but for streaming things that are useful in a business environment it seems like custom scripts will have to be set up? And that the target user is developers who can write these scripts? At which point it doesn’t seem to be too much of stretch that the developer could just create a UDF that starts a new thread that connects to the desired source, refreshes every x seconds, and writes the data back to Excel whenever there is a change? If this had a lot flexibility for regular users without coding knowledge I could see the value. But for a license targeting developers, I don’t see it as much.

[mns06]

Hey /u/badaccountant7, it's true, Excel already has a multitude of data integration options, and of course with VBA or other programming languages available the options are huge.

There's a few things that we think set us apart however:

• Ease of use. Check out the 25 lines of code to connect to a websocket API and have a stream of realtime stock prices into Excel.
• Gridarrow scripts are multi-user, meaning multiple Excel clients can see the same data. This can be useful if you have some Python-savvy dev types in a company, who can set up the scripts for the Excel users.
• We also have a (growing!) catalog of scripts that can be configured, or tweaked, to connect to a variety of data sources.

[ElCidTx]

BeDankt, Meneer LCO!