ModelSheet Software LLC is a venture-funded software company focused on business analytics and based in

Arlington, Massachusetts Arlington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The town is six miles (10 km) northwest of Boston, and its population was 46,308 at the 2020 census. History European colonists settled the Town of Arlington in 1635 as a village ...

History

ModelSheet was founded by two

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

graduates, Richard Petti and Howard Cannon who earlier worked together at

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

, and later in the division spun out as

Macsyma Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics and ...

. After the Macsyma episode in 1980s and 1990s the pair took separate career paths (Petti at The MathWorks, Cannon at Groton NeoChem and SciQuest), then rejoined to found ModelSheet in 2007.

Strategy, products and services

ModelSheet Software was founded to put more desktop modeling power in the hands of business experts without requiring them to become programmers. The

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ce ...

is the classic example of such an end-user development tool, but its cell-based paradigm has its limitations. ModelSheet technology attempts to addresses these limitations with two types of products: Custom Spreadsheet Solutions, and the ModelSheet Authoring Environment. By filling in a simple form, a Custom Spreadsheet Solution yields a custom spreadsheet workbook, without users having to edit spreadsheets or cell formulas. Users can set three aspects of spreadsheet models: time series (time range, time grains, and rollup grains), dimensions (e.g. a list of products organized in product families) and turning on or off model features. ModelSheet offers Custom Spreadsheet Solutions for many common business tasks in corporate finance (financial plans, cash flow analysis, cap tables, activity-based budgets, etc.), marketing and sales analysis (sales plans, marketing program effectiveness, price elasticity, etc.) and other areas. Users can download the Custom Spreadsheet Solutions as Excel workbooks, or upload them to an account on

Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. G ...

. The ModelSheet Authoring Environment provides all functionality needed to build spreadsheet models from scratch and edit existing models. It retains the visual flavor of spreadsheets, while adding in model structures such as named variables, symbolic formulas with varying scopes, time series, dimensions, and controls for optional features and automated operations. ModelSheet Authoring is the technical backend of Custom Spreadsheets. For intermediate cases (where more flexibility is needed, but the customer doesn't require frequent use of the Authoring Environment itself) the company offers consulting services in which a ModelSheet engineer uses the Authoring Environment to create a spreadsheet to the customer's specification.

Criticism

Testing a pre-beta version in 2008, journalist Dennis Howlett of ZD Net concluded that ModelSheet was "good in theory" but "needs more work." Howlett criticized several aspects: Windows-only platform support, bugs, poor usability, choice of fonts, and dull quick start guide. Although "bemused" by the product, Howlett did concede "Modelsheet is at an early stage of development and I'm sure twill improve over time."

Notes

References

* http://www.manta.com/c/mtbr350/modelsheet-software-llc * http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/modelsheet-software

External links