Quantrix Modeler- What Excel should be

hmurchison

I just watched the flash presentation. Wow this is exactly what I've wanted in a spreadsheet application. What it does is pretty amazing if you've ever dinked around with today's spreadsheets. In the flash demo you will see how they put together a chart showing assumed growth of automobiles for multiple regions and products. They did this with 4 formulas and said Excel would require 213. They also show how data display can be modified without require any changes to the formulas.



I couldn't help but think that this technology is what Apple is supposed to be finding and popularizing. Quantrix Modeler is $990 but if Apple had access to such technology bringing it to the masses would be far cheaper. For anyone who ever thought Excel couldn't get in better..watch the presentation and find out just how old and crusty today's spreadsheet apps really are.



Quantrix



Quantrix Flash Presentation

mccrab

Looks very good but I wonder if it offers the same flexibility as the building blocks offered in traditional spreadsheets. In any event, the separation of logic/data/presentation in the worksheet seem like a significant step forward in the way these things are constructed.



Given the price point, and the fact it is not bundled with MS Office (!) probably means it is destined to be in a niche market. Unless of course someone like Apple were to buy it and offer a cross platform version in the next release of AppleOffice

mmmpie

Quote:

Originally posted by McCrab

Looks very good but I wonder if it offers the same flexibility as the building blocks offered in traditional spreadsheets. In any event, the separation of logic/data/presentation in the worksheet seem like a significant step forward in the way these things are constructed.



Given the price point, and the fact it is not bundled with MS Office (!) probably means it is destined to be in a niche market. Unless of course someone like Apple were to buy it and offer a cross platform version in the next release of AppleOffice

I thought it looked really nice. Will have to dl the trial to play with. My concern is that the assumptions that the underlying system makes ( autofilling formulas etc ) will limit its applicability. The demo was sweet, but I get the feeling that when you want to do something they havent allowed for it will get real hard real fast. I think if you keep in mind that it is a financial modeling tool, and not a programming tool ( spreadsheet ), it will fill an important niche.



However, I think it really does the highlight the complexity of spreadsheets. My intuition is that Quantix is not a spreadsheet at all, but rather a different solution to the problem. More like a nice gui for fortran arrays. Perhaps it is a database, it seems to have automatic relational features.



Either way, very nice, and Im sure that once the FOSS world gets a look at it will be quickly ripped off. I hope they have some deeper features to make the $1k price tag worth it. At the moment it is one of those interface things that is very obvious and easy in hindsight.

chris cuilla

This is like 10 years old. It was a spreadsheet that was written by a company call Lighthouse Design for NEXTEP. It was basically a knock-off of Lotus Improv (which cam a bit earlier). Lighthouse Design was bought by Sun...and the software pretty much shelved (they had some other great products too...a presentation application, that had some outlining features similar to OmniOutliner, a drawing program that seems to be an ancestor ro OmniGraffle). The head of Lighthouse Design was Jonathon Schwartz...now a big-wig at Sun. Glad to see that some of their software isn't collecting dust.