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VBA wasn’t bad enough, now millions of analysts will have to contend with spreadsheet spaghetti and JavaScript.
VBA wasn’t bad enough, now millions of analysts will have to contend with spreadsheet spaghetti and JavaScript.
I'm thinking of all the places where I've seen Excel used in operations. Often it's the only software the company uses. Now we're going to get people who've done a little javascript in college using it to elaborate the Spreadsheet That Runs Our Business. In all likelihood, the resulting chimera will make an impenetrable tangle of VBA and Javascript.
Yikes, I hope people won't be doing any financial calculations in Excel JS. But I know they will.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm thinking of all the places where I've seen Excel used in operations. Often it's the only software the company uses. Now we're going to get people who've done a little javascript in college using it to elaborate the Spreadsheet That Runs Our Business. In all likelihood, the resulting chimera will make an impenetrable tangle of VBA and Javascript.
And if that works for the business... then where's the problem?
But no Python support as they promised. So sad.
> Any custom Python code, like a function to analyze text in cells.
Sounds like you'll probably be able to hack Excel into running whatever Python code you want using the Azure ML integrations. I guess it'll be Javascript the people currently writing VBA are pushed toward though.
My first question is will we be able to use wasm instead of javascript? That would open excel not only to javascript (which people may or may not like) but pretty much to any other language as long as someone builds a wasm runtime/compiler to (which seems to be on the radar of lots of people, starting with the .net team). Would also make more sense to me from a performance point of view.
More realistically, many languages can already be compiled to JS, you might not need wasm.
> Office developers have been wanting to write JavaScript custom functions for many reasons, such as: > • Calculate math operations, like whether a number is prime. It saddens me that this is a thing we want Javascript for. So anyway, now we have XLL, COM, VBA, and Javascript. All of them different but overlapping ways to extend what Excel can do. Am I missing any?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will use what choice microsoft gives them. Unfortunately that choice seems to be between a 20 year old language (VB6) and javascript...
VBScript is not VB6