We integrate our software with your Windows environment such that:
Because we have found front-line support across the industry to often be an unhelpful waste of customers' time, we make a different tradeoff in our own support offering. We may be slower to respond to your request, but when we respond you'll be interacting with a real person who can, themself, fix your problem or answer your question.
A challenge when supporting Excel-based software is that there is often a blurry line between product support and general Excel support.
For example, because named ranges and/or structured references are integral to parameterizing in-cell SQL, we often receive help requests from customers having trouble with these underlying mechanisms.
Another common support request arises when customers use a large number of lookup formulas to rearrange rectangular Snowflake datasets into a more presentation-oriented format.
This is fine as long as the formulas are carefully crafted, i.e., using INDEX+MATCH or XLOOKUP rather than VLOOKUP; sorting Snowflake data such that lookup functions can employ binary searches; ensuring that volatile functions, like INDIRECT and OFFSET, are not used.
If these best practices are not known or ignored, the post-Snowflake-refresh workbook recalculation can easily take minutes rather than milliseconds — and this slowness is often confused with query refresh speed.
We love helping our customers but we've found that becoming on-call Excel experts invites an unmanageable volume of requests. Particularly because most of our customers are using Excel as a secondary tool and don't have deep expertise.
It is in this spirit that we have now reorganized our stock Enterprise support into three triage levels:
A 'business hour' is a New York City 9AM-5PM hour on any non-US-holiday weekday.
All support requests must be initiated with an email to support (ɑt) optimalxl.com. After this initial contact, we often switch to telephone/Zoom as we find that to be more effective for troubleshooting.
If you need higher-touch support, reach out at info (ɑt) optimalxl.com and we may be able to arrange something that works for your team.
We do not guarantee these response times nor do we offer SLAs for Enterprise customers. Our customers have — occasionally — created Excel monstrosities with our software, and we need to reserve the peremptory right to say, "Sorry, we can't help you with that," in order to preserve our time for the rest of you.
Note that optimal(xl) uses Excel add-in APIs that are also used by bad actors and therefore may trigger false positives in anti-virus products with overgeneralized virus definitions. If your firm has outsourced their Windows infrastructure to an extent that it is difficult to whitelist local machine directories, we don't have the resources to become involved in communication with your anti-virus vendor and/or your IT infrastructure provider to rectify quarantined or forcibly deleted optimal(xl) dependencies. We will, however, give you a comprehensive script to assist your own communication with these providers.