Blockspring, a service that connects to spreadsheets like Excel and Google Spreadsheets to easier import data.Instead of having to write specific code to import and sort data in a spreadsheet, Blockspring has several connections to services like Google Search that will automatically populate spreadsheets with data. The company plans to release several integrations for tools like Tableau and Slack. For example, a Blockspring user can quickly pull in PDF files from the web and analyze them in a spreadsheet. That would originally including searching for those articles, downloading each one, and then analyzing them — such as searching for specific words. That data can be manipulated in as many ways as there are APIs that are plugged into Blockspring.

Really interested to see powerful use cases or "blocks" develop. Potential is massive if the community gets active.

This is great - I've been waiting for something like this. For the business version - what kind of security do you employ if we're connecting Blockspring to our internal database?

As a dev, I built a mobile backend on blockspring and firebase - its basically a nicer version of AWS Lambda. My API's logic is secured by blockspring, the code is in a container that spins up every time my API is hit and my data is stored in Firebase (but I could've also done it in sqlite). As a non dev, it feels awesome to be able to import large data sets from APIs like meetup.com in excel so I can do some text and trend analysis without having to set up anything!

Looks amazing!!

@whatsdonisdon any plans to integrate this with Streak CRM? I would be totally sold if so!

This is rad!

Excellent find, looks very promising

Congrats and keep up the great work!

We at @a16z just announced a 3.4M investment in Blockspring this morning [0,1]. There are 1.2 billion Office users [2] and between 50-900 million Google Apps users [3,4], so this should prove useful to an extremely large number of people. Essentially anyone who does anything even moderately complex in a spreadsheet will benefit from using the BLOCKSPRING function and Blockspring Enterprise to factor out their code. [0] https://twitter.com/balajis/stat... [1] http://a16z.com/2015/07/29/block... [2] https://news.microsoft.com/bythe... [3] http://fortune.com/2015/05/29/gm... [4] http://www.enterpriseappstoday.c...

found several hacks that I've been looking for a while... spent half of the day playing with the app. Love it!

Looks quite useful. Just spent 30 minutes testing how to use it. There are much of potential use cases for people doing research, or wanting to automate various things. It will take some time to learn the full potential of the service, but it’s more dependent on what you want to do with it.

One of the best new tools to come along in years. Well done fellas!

Interesting !

This is brilliant, it makes analyzing and making sense of data so easy. Thanks for making this

Hey everyone - co-founder of Blockspring here to answer any questions :) Spreadsheets aren't powerful until you have data in it! So we're here to help you get that done. Blockspring goes beyond just getting data though. It also has a lot of powerful functions that were previously only available to people that knew how to program - so now you can do crazy things like determine whether text has a "positive" or "negative" sentiment, just by using a spreadsheet function. We've seen regular Excel users combine the new functions to make some really crazy tools for their teams.

Really well done - @whatsdonisdon, are you planning to create a Zapier integration to improve the existing ability Zapier has to interact with Google Sheets?