Right Menu — How and Why We Built It

I am Elena Naumčiková (Veselova) — a cost manager with over 30 years in construction economics. Find me on LinkedIn. My husband Oleg Naumčik (LinkedIn) is the developer behind Right Menu.

The Preamble: Construction Industry and Excel

I have been working in construction economics and cost management for over 30 years. I have managed finances for major projects—from residential complexes and commercial real estate to complex infrastructure. I have been on the side of the client, the general contractor, and the investor.

The key characteristic of large-scale construction is this: Every project has a unique financial reporting structure tailored to a specific investor. Building this in any specialized software is impossible—the timelines are too short (a project closes in 2–3 years), there are too many stakeholders, and requirements change constantly. Therefore, everything, from top to bottom, is done in Excel.

The Scale of the Problem

On large construction sites, you work with 50+ subcontractors. Each of them submits monthly data in Excel: acts of completed work, price changes, bills of quantities.

In practice, the only viable way to manage this data without creating total chaos is one subcontractor = one file. Over the course of a 3-year project, a single subcontractor's file grows into its own monster:

All months of the construction period (up to 36 sheets)

Acts of completed work (another 36+ sheets)

Contracts and pricing appendices

Dozens of summary reports moving "up" the hierarchy

Very quickly, a single subcontractor's file contains 70 to 100+ sheets. And you have 50+ of these files per project.

The Breaking Point

"I was absolutely exhausted from constantly clicking the bottom tab bar. When you have more than 10 sheets, they become unreadable. You have to abbreviate names. When you have 70 sheets, you abbreviate names so much they turn into meaningless acronyms that no one understands anymore."

That is how it all started. My husband wrote the first version of a script for me. The idea was born: Vertical sheet navigation—a scrollable panel on the right side. That is how Right Menu was born.

How Right Menu Changes the Game

1. Vertical Sheet Navigation

Full sheet names, never abbreviated. Whether you have 20 or 150 sheets, the sidebar maintains its shape—you just scroll. Color indicators preserve readability instead of painting entire tabs. Your eyes won't burn, even after 12 hours of work.

2. Report – One-Click Workbook Audit

Report scans the entire workbook across 6 security and data quality categories:

SEC-01 External Links – risk of data leakage to outside files

SEC-02 Hidden Sheets – concealed confidential data

SEC-03 Formula Errors – #REF!, #DIV/0!, #NAME?, #VALUE!, #N/A, #NUM!, #NULL!

QA-01 Numbers Stored as Text – silent calculation errors

QA-02 Merged Cells – break sorting, filtering, and pivot tables

QA-03 Empty Sheets – file bloat

A new sheet appears with clickable links to every problem cell. Tip: Received a file from a subcontractor? Click Report before you even start reading it.

3. Hidden Sheets and Data Leakage

Hidden sheets are an uncontrolled channel for leaks of sensitive data: cost structures, payroll records, internal infrastructure links. Sending a file with names and salaries violates GDPR Article 32 (fines up to 4% of annual turnover). Our Report uncovers every hidden sheet with one click, before the file leaves the company.

4. Unmerge – Fix Merged Cells in One Click

Merged cells silently destroy sorting, filtering, and pivot tables. Unmerge fixes every merged cell in the entire workbook—or just the current sheet—preserving all data and formatting.

5. Teleport – Instant Sheet Navigation

Right Menu remembers the previous sheet. Teleport jumps you back and forth in a fraction of a second. Indispensable for workbooks with 10+ sheets.

6. Link to – Visual Cross-Sheet Formulas

Forget typing =Sheet2!B5. Click the source sheet and cells—Right Menu builds the formula automatically. Combined with Teleport, create cross-references in seconds instead of minutes.

7. Copy from – Extract Values from Any Sheet, Even Protected

Copy from bypasses protection limitations. Values are inserted as static data—no formulas, no broken links. Works where native Excel copy-paste refuses to operate.

8. The Third Dimension: Your Data Hypercube

Excel already supports over 1,000 sheets per workbook and native 3D formulas that calculate across them. This gives you a third dimension—time, versions, scenarios—right inside a single file. No database. No imports. No exports. Every cell is visible, touchable, verifiable. In practice? The standard tab bar at the bottom makes this entire mega-space useless. Right Menu unlocks that third dimension. Combined with 3D formulas, your workbook becomes a data hypercube you navigate with the ease of a space bike. Each sheet is a slice through time or a layer of your project. Teleport jumps between slices instantly. Link to builds cross-layer formulas visually. Your data stays where you can see it and touch it—not locked inside an invisible database you have to painfully load and painfully extract.

Do you really think Excel cannot hold all the data for an entire construction project? Consider this: a single sheet holds 16,000 rows and up to 16,000 columns. A resident's record—name, address, cadastral plot, area, tax, building type—takes around 200 columns. That means 16,000 residents per sheet. The complete records of 3.5 million people from a "small village" in India? Around 220 sheets. You still have hundreds left. The only limit is your computer's power—Excel is ready, and so is Right Menu. The capacity was never the problem. The problem was always navigation.

No AI. No Data Collection.

We are a two-person company. We deliberately chose not to add AI to Right Menu. We don't transfer your data, we don't analyze it, we don't store it anywhere. Everything runs locally inside your Excel—nothing leaves your workbook.

Let's be honest: we are two people with 30 years of our own construction data piled up to the ceiling. We physically do not have the capacity—or the desire—to look at yours. Your spreadsheets stay yours. Period.

Who We Are

We are just two people. I am a solo cost manager who lived through the pain of construction data, and my husband is a solo IT developer who wanted to make my life easier. Right Menu was built out of genuine necessity, in our living room, to solve a very real problem that I faced every single day.

Our Philosophy

Right Menu is not a robot or automation. It is a human accelerator. It doesn't do the work for you; it removes the unbearable friction of daily routines. Once a user turns on Right Menu in the morning, they don't turn it off until the evening.

I compare it to shoes. Standard Excel with a million sheets is like heavy military boots. Right Menu is like custom-made Italian leather shoes. You can reach your destination in both. But with the first, you'll have blisters by evening. With the second, you won't even realize you've walked a marathon.

This add-in requires an active paid SaaS subscription (per-user license). Features are unavailable if the subscription expires or is canceled.

Connect with us: Elena Naumčiková | Oleg Naumčik

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