optimal(xl)

An Excel Add-in That Transforms How You Save, Find & Share Your Excel Work.

SAVE

Save any part of a workbook — a sheet, chart, pivot table, range of cells, format or formula. Or a workbook or group of workbooks.

In the cloud — with no data transfer fees — or in a SQLite database on your own computer.

With built-in time travel / versioning and a simple command palette UI to fine-tune how an Excel object is extracted from its parent workbook and stored.

Easily pull your Excel objects back into Excel as building blocks for models and analysis or to compare with other versions.

FIND

Dazzling-fast & targeted search for any cell text, worksheet function, sheet or range name, chart label, Power Query SQL, database connection string or VBA code — across all your Excel objects and their version histories.

No more crawling through workbooks to find formula examples or drilling into folder hierarchies trying to remember where you put a file.

Instantly find every workbook or pivot table that queries a particular database or table.

Excel objects are stored alongside classification metadata and png screenshots so you can visualize search results before opening.

SHARE

Share workbooks or parts of workbooks with url-like links refreshable from within Excel.

Links can be point-in-time permalinks or perpetually reference the latest version of an Excel object.

Copy a link to an Excel Table into a cell, press {Ctrl + Shift + Q}, it will fill in directly below.

Publish new versions of sheets, pivot tables, and ranges that update your teammates' models automatically.

No more emailing

fx_hedge_USE_THIS_ONE_final03.xlsx

to the trading desk.


Optimal(xl) in a Nutshell

THERE WHEN YOU NEED IT; OUT OF YOUR WAY OTHERWISE

Optimal(xl) gives you new powers without disrupting any of your existing Excel habits.

It doesn't take over any native Excel behavior, shortcut keys, or menus.

You can use it only to save workbooks you open from email — to avoid searching for them again in Outlook.

Or only for 'Book1'-style scratch workbooks that you want to save just-in-case.

You can continue to save your workbooks the same as always, and only use optimal(xl) to share bits and pieces of them or to store your own quick-access examples of worksheet functions or to save & retrieve a Power Query-connected Excel table you repeatedly use in different workbooks.

Unobtrusive

Pedigree
HIGH-END PROFESSIONAL TOOLS FOR EVERYONE

Add-ins similar to optimal(xl) have a rich history at investment banks and hedge funds where they allow users to save arbitrary cell ranges to a central database.

Coworkers can then pull those cells, with informative formulas and formats, into their own models.

Originally devised as a simple way for authorities on data and computations to share their results with the rest of their firm, it became a popular tool used in a thousand different ways from crowdsourcing examples of frequently-used Excel worksheet functions to publishing March Madness leaderboard updates to hundreds of subscribers.

Often it is simply a convenient way to take snapshots of data and formulas to refer back to later.

Optimal(xl) brings this technology to the general public for the first time.


YOUR OWN KEY-VALUE DATABASE FOR ANYTHING IN EXCEL

You're used to saving Excel workbooks as xlsx or xlsm files. And you can keep doing that.

Optimal(xl) gives you the option to save workbooks, or parts of workbooks — we collectively call these Excel objects — as a row in a SQLite database.

This database is on your local machine but you can also choose to keep copies of some (or all) of your objects in the cloud.

You save individual Excel objects to your database by using an id/name. Or keywords. Or nothing — we can generate an id for you and our search is so good that any fragment of content will instantly produce your Excel objects whether you name them or not.

When you save an object, its historic versions are preserved.

Pull your Excel objects right back into Excel using the same id you saved with or via a command palette search.

When you pull with a (id, date) key, you'll get the last value with that id that was saved on or before the specified date.

How
it
works