Boardwalk Velocity: The GitHub for Excel

When I was first tasked with introducing Boardwalk Velocity to the market, the product immediately reminded me of GitHub. Both solutions fundamentally serve the same core purpose—managing data in a collaborative, version-controlled environment.

As a software engineer by training, I've been using GitHub since I started my professional journey. What truly sets GitHub apart is the way it enables you to work: you can 'branch' a master codebase into your own personal environment, experiment without impacting the entire system, and then merge changes back once tested. Boardwalk Velocity does the same thing for spreadsheets.

Collaboration Without Headaches

GitHub enables multiple people to work on the same codebase simultaneously. Before GitHub, it was difficult—often downright tedious—for two engineers to collaborate on a single code file. Boardwalk Velocity does the same thing for spreadsheets. While GitHub tracks changes at the character level in code, Boardwalk Velocity tracks changes at the cell level in Excel.

Introducing the 'Cuboid'

Unlike typical spreadsheet collaboration tools that operate on the file level (like Google Sheets or O365), Boardwalk Velocity is built on an innovation we call the 'Cuboid.' The Cuboid is essentially a cell-level database. This foundational difference drives unparalleled collaboration because each cell is managed independently, just like lines of code in GitHub.

Branching and Merging Made Simple

The concept behind Boardwalk Velocity is similar to GitHub's branching and merging. We've simply shifted the focus to spreadsheets. We call the branching function 'Refresh' and the merging function 'Submit.' Those two actions take care of version control in your spreadsheets, so you can focus on the actual work rather than juggling multiple versions and email threads.