Calcapp
Build apps with your spreadsheet skills
Calcapp
Build apps with your spreadsheet skills
Calcapp is an app designer for Excel users with support for over 200 formula functions. Lay out your interface visually, connect formulas to fields and share your app with co-workers, customers, and friends. Add multi-level menus to help your users navigate, buttons that e-mail PDF reports and validation rules that flag bad values. Apps work offline.
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We got our start years ago when my father asked me to create an app for the hospital department where he was working as a doctor. We sold that app and created another one for calculating drog dosages, which we also sold. During that process, I created an app maker enabling these kinds of apps to be created as easily as an Excel spreadsheet.
Calcapp is now in late beta and we're adding useful features every day. The feedback we have received to date has been instrumental in shaping the product. We added the ability to send PDF and CSV reports from apps as a direct result of this feedback.
I'm looking forward to hearing about your experiences with Calcapp! Please use this space to ask any questions you may have.
For instance, Calcapp is not limited to calculating values to display to the user (cell values in Excel and field values in Calcapp). You can use formulas to determine many other things, such as whether a field should be visible, the e-mail addresses a report should be sent to and the color of a field. You can also use formulas to determine whether a button should be grayed-out and whether the user should be allowed to move on to another screen.
Calcapp supports 268 formula functions, of which 242 are also supported by Excel. Chances are that you'll be able to transfer many of your formulas as-is, even if they use advanced statistical or financial functions.
In terms of limitations, Calcapp doesn't (yet) work with data tables. As such, you can't use functions like HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP to find values. Small table look-ups can be expressed using the IF formula functions, but that quickly becomes impractical. Also, there is no support for graphs or saving data from an app to a database or to a spreadsheet. (Apps can e-mail data, though, in formats including CSV, which works well for importing data into databases and spreadsheets. There is also support for sending data to your own server, but that requires quite a bit of technical expertise.)
Are your spreadsheets large enough that Google Sheets and Excel break (meaning that your computer runs out of memory)? We've worked very hard to ensure that the apps you build with Calcapp consume as little memory as possible and can run on even low-powered cell phones. With that said, though, if your solutions are large enough that you break Excel and Google Sheets, chances are that you'll break Calcapp too. It hasn't been a concern for our community up to this point, though, and our users have definitely built apps I consider large.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Now, Google Sheets can obviously make many of the same claims in regards to being compatible with Excel, and that means that if you're used to Google Sheets, using Calcapp should be very straightforward.
There's more information on our blog, if you're interested. We redid the way our formulas work a year ago to make them more similar to Excel's formulas: https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2016/06/02/formula-syntax.html
Also, we don't yet support importing spreadsheets directly (though copy-and-pasting formulas usually work fine): https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2017/03/08/import.html