Squirrel and Openbox Integration

by | Nov 12, 2021

This Tuesday we teamed up with the folks at Openbox to deliver a webinar showing how Openbox and Squirrel make a great combination for financial modelling. The on-demand version of the webinar is available at Build and Visualize a financial model with Squirrel and Openbox (squirrel365.io).

One of the questions on the Webinar was about integration between the two products and where this might go in the future. The interesting thing is that while there are many possible integration options for the future, there is no specific integration between the tools today.

So, you might ask, if there is no integration how can the products work so well together.

The answer to this is that both Openbox and Squirrel are tools which are built around spreadsheets and whilst other tools aim to take over the role of the spreadsheet, Openbox and Squirrel both strive to leave spreadsheets doing what they do best and then adding extra capability around that.  Specifically ..

Openbox allows Excel-based financial models to be built quickly and robustly using a standards-based methodology (as I say in the webinar, I started my career as a financial modeller and I would have love to have access to a tool like Openbox back then)

Squirrel allows spreadsheets to be easily turned into great looking, interactive web documents without any coding.

Crucially both tools can read and write Excel files, this allows the output of one to be used as the input of the other.

So, although there is no specific integration between the two tools, the ubiquitous xlsx file format means they can work together pretty much seamlessly in a great combination for anyone building financial models.

If you want to see what Squirrel could do for your spreadsheet, register for a free account at Squirrel365.io.