There's a whole cottage industry around WhatsApp that exists to provide tools and services to commodity brokers and traders, primarily for compliance and bulk messaging existing customers. Meta has nerfed bulk forwarding on their desktop app, and the industry moved to third party tools to work around this. The reality is, no-one is spamming, everyone is consenting to this, everyone understands the risks, but a lot of markets live on the WhatsApp network, and despite there being compliant chat solutions, the existing network effects keep the status quo. Prior to WhatsApp, the markets operated on Yahoo Messenger, and the only reason there was a move was because Yahoo shut it down in 2016.
If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.
Absolutely, the people using us seem think so! We target a niche: real time sharing of commodity pricing. The linked data can live in different files and layouts, can be updated via web or mobile, and full change history is stored as well.
We explored a few options when trying to solve the sharing problem, including OneDrive, Google Sheets, and some 3rd parties. Couldn’t find anything that fit the bill.
FWIW- What you describe could be down to OneDrive’s data quotas. If you’re dealing with pricing data or any numerical data then CT Grid solves that issue. Even if it’s not a perfect fit, I’d be happy to share the experience if it helps you.
I used xlwings in a variety of settings over the years, and it was my go-to when building the first two prototypes of our Excel commodity price sync functionality. We hit a performance wall pretty quickly due to the nature of our use case so we moved to Excel's C API and built our own add-in. This move took a lot of effort to get right, the C API has a tendency to punish you hard (crash Excel) for the smallest of transgressions. xlwings allowed us to prove the concept pretty quickly and without fear of crashing Excel before committing to C.
Don't mean for this to sound like a testimonial for xlwings (I guess, it kinda is) - it's been very useful for us so I had to share! It's a great library, has great documentation, and I can't recommend it enough. However, if you're after low latency* for real-time interactions across a large dataset, you'll need to look elsewhere, or roll your own.
* under 2 second response; you're dealing with Excel after all!
If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.