Ravel: a thank you to my supporters

Making Ravel: the spreadsheet killer available to my supporters on Substack and Patreon

Jun 21, 2024

My programmer-partner-friend Russell Standish and I have just released Ravel. This program builds on Minsky to enable a graphical way to do data analysis which is far easier to use, and far more powerful, than either spreadsheets or Pivot Tables.

I will make it available to all my financial supporters on Substack, but I can’t get it to you via Substack itself, since it only supports the upload of PDFs and similar files.

Raveltutorial

9.02MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Instead, I will shortly send you all an email with the ZIP file attached. I have attached the Ravel tutorial here though, since that is in PDF format.

Initially we will market Ravel via a Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/ravelation. The page is now live, though we haven't yet started to market it.

The application remains active for 87 days from today (June 21st 2024): every new version has a 90-day life-span before an update must be installed (from the File/Upgrade menu item). This will check to see if you are a financial member of https://www.patreon.com/Ravelation. If you are, the latest version will be installed; if not, it will prompt you to sign up. We are charging $7 per month for membership--which is $3 less than Microsoft charges for its "Business Intelligence" program PowerBI.

Please do download this version and give it a test run. We are confident that, if you use either spreadsheets or Business Intelligence programs, you will find Ravel both far easier to use, and far more powerful.

Please feel free to share this version with friends and colleagues as well (once you receive the email). Since we have a marketing budget of $0, we are relying upon "viral marketing".

I am unable to do much at present from my current location of St Vincent's (I'm here with the David Graeber Institute to see whether we can establish a Winter School for non-mainstream economics and anthropology), because the internet is so poor (I'm currently on a balcony on the edge of one of the hotel's villas, since this is the only place where you can get a decent connection. So it would be great if you can assist me by helping this application to "go viral" before I can.

Thank you again for your support over the years: we couldn't have built Ravel without it.