Back in April, I asked 6 friends to pass rapid judgement on my latest attempt to define the Roundsheet application. I asked them to give the document a quick scan and to provide answers to the questions below with either Yes or No, and to feel free to add comments or suggestions if they wished.
- Were you able to understand what was being described?
- Do the Roundsheet concepts make sense to you?
- Do you think a Roundsheet application would give users something they haven’t got already?
- Is it worth pursuing this idea any further?
I received 5 replies. Not everyone was able to answer either Yes or No to each question – some answers were ‘partly’ or ‘sort of’ or ‘don’t know’ or ‘possibly’; so, I’m going to classify all such in-between kind of responses as ‘not sure’. Applying this rule of thumb, the bare number results were:
| Question | Yes | Not Sure | No |
| Able to understand? | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Concepts make sense? | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Something user’s haven’t got? | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| Worth pursuing? | 2 | 2 | 1 |
Some of the comments were interesting:
“one would think that many spreadsheets have pie chart functionalities: your concept is really about how to use those functionalities”
“whether this could be a protected tool? I think you would have difficulty”
“still wondering why the roundsheet format is any better than the tabular format which apparently could be used instead?”
“may be of interest to those who get frustrated by the complexities of linking Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint applications – I have come across a few of those in my career!”
“I feel there is a core there that could be extremely useful”
However, overall, there’s no overwhelming consensus that this is a winning idea, and it’s probably unlikely that time spent trying to promote its development into a product would be rewarded; so I think this is the time to put this journey to bed. I have enjoyed the intellectual challenge it has given me; and have the satisfaction of knowing that I took the ideas as far as I could and finished the job. I could always bring the topic out of retirement should someone come along with a serious interest in taking it forward.
Thank you to all of you who, over the years, have taken the time to wade through and pass comment on the various specification documents.