Product Hunt Daily - Replacing Excel

Many of us are still using Microsoft Excel or its direct competitors, despite the fact that it takes an influencer to teach many of us how to use it.

We’ve been highlighting promising nextgen spreadsheet software (Equals, Rows, ActionDesk) as it pops up, and last week a new product in this space caught our attention because of its focus on using the power of the spreadsheets without much of the traditional spreadsheet UI.

Causal is a new tool for working with numbers but unlike Excel or Sheets, it enables you to write formulas in plain English and create interactive dashboard reports where you can play without breaking things. Live integrations pull data from your accounting system, CRM, HRIS, or data warehouse. One early adopter's favorite feature is the ability to bake uncertainty into your models: “Instead of saying our cost of showing 1,000 ads (CPM) is $10, we can say it's $8 to $10 and then everything downstream that references that will show a range too.”

We first met Causal a couple of years ago when the makers, Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis, launched its browser extension for Google Sheets. The London-based team has since closed a Series A, grew its team to 50+, and last year added 30% more customers month-on-month.

The tool is meant to be for just about everyone at your business. Founders can use it to forecast runway, sales teams to forecast pipeline, marketing for performance planning, and of course, financial teams for budgeting and beyond.

Of course, when it comes to non-numbers people actually being able to work with numbers, the proof is in the pudding. When asked by a Product Hunt community member if the tool is easy to use, Abdaal shared, “There's a bit of a learning curve but you can understand most of the concepts in 15 mins or so!”

The demo video will show you an example of how users can create new visualizations in plain English.