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Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

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Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#91

Post by pjmlp »

chrispsn wrote: post #41
TomMarius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that your software does not run on top of Excel. Nowadays it is not as much of a problem, but in the past, Excel was often the only software you could use to do something like this - enterprise computers used to be incredibly locked down.

It's true, not being part of Excel adds some friction. Thankfully IE11 has Office interop via COM, so Mesh (or a site embedding Mesh) can talk to existing spreadsheet investments. And on the locked-down front, Mesh doesn't require IT permissions to run (unless JS is disabled in your browser).

Which was dropped from Edge anyway.

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#92

Post by pjmlp »

tluyben2 wrote: post #36
imhoguy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XLSX files are just zipped XML files: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML Hint: as far as I remember compression ratio is 0 (stored) - best to keep such on re-save for compatibility.

Not really readable or editable though.

They are with the help of tooling.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/open-xml-sd...

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#93

Post by chrispsn »

pjmlp wrote: post #91
chrispsn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, not being part of Excel adds some friction. Thankfully IE11 has Office interop via COM, so Mesh (or a site embedding Mesh) can talk to existing spreadsheet investments. And on the locked-down front, Mesh doesn't require IT permissions to run (unless JS is disabled in your browser).

Which was dropped from Edge anyway.

Good news! IE11 will be supported until at least 2025 :D

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#94

Post by antpls »

cm2187 wrote: post #88
ramraj07 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possibility is this - the people who mess with Excel VBA are generally very smart folk who just never went too techy, but then got really good at Excel and just learned vba as the next logical step. That means the code might not be kosher but it will be thoughtfully written and encompassing all the practical use cases. Contrast that with a 20something can grad who while competent isn't as smart as that non tech g…

A good recent example of that. We were asking a dev team to build a dashboard (we are a bank) showing capital ratios. The team came back saying voila! We looked at it, and the headline number in bold at the centre of the dashboard was showing a cet1 ratio of 1300% (a cet1 ratio is typically in the 5%-20% range). I am sure they used modern programming techniques, but they left an error that would have shocked even the…

On the other hand, a dashboard is probably one of the most boring stuff to work on when you have a CS degree. Typically, a dashboard is asked as a deliverable to keep the dev team busy while also making sure other people's jobs in the bank arent rendered obsolete if the dev team were used to its full potential.

The people saying Devs dont do enough effort to understand the domain are the same people who try to keep the "domain" overly complicated to justify their jobs/positions

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#95

Post by dvdhsu »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #68
dvdhsu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi — that’s what we’re working on! Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) is similar to Excel, except the cells are themselves React components. And you can refer to other components inside the props for each component. You can pull in data either via SQL, APIs, or any other data source we support. Everything inside Retool is also JavaScript, so it’s pretty hackable. If you’ve got any feedback, please let me know! I’m davi…

I read the domain name as Tyre Tool.

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll look more into what we can do. We tried purchasing the .com for around 6 figures, but the buyer wouldn’t sell. I’ll try sending him an email again.

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#97

Post by Intermernet »

dvdhsu wrote: post #95
james_s_tayler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the domain name as Tyre Tool.

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll look more into what we can do. We tried purchasing the .com for around 6 figures, but the buyer wouldn’t sell. I’ll try sending him an email again.

I thought I'd seen a .tool TLD that may have helped you but unfortunately it's .tools instead.

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#98

Post by fxfan »

cm2187 wrote: post #89

It is great that Microsoft is investing in Office again. I just got upgraded at work from office 2007 to 2016 (we like to take our time, I was on WinXP not so long ago), and I can barely see the difference. They changed some colors, there are menus that open in a panel instead of a modal box. I don’t think a single user cares about these changes (and they seem to have carefully preserved the bugs). And the problemati…

You clearly missed out on the magical fill. Search for Sumit gulwani excel. Another collaboration with MSR

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#99

Post by vanderZwan »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #25
bvaldivielso wrote: post #14

It's interesting to note that one of the people behind this work is Simon Peyton Jones, known (among other things) for creating haskell and being the lead developer of the GHC.

Isn’t he busy at Facebook or is he though with that?

Alternative mix-up: maybe you're thinking of Andrei Alexandrescu, who worked on D while at Facebook? Names don't match but it's [programming language guy] at Facebook.

Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

#100

Post by buovjaga »

4thaccount wrote: post #11
aj7 wrote: post #6

A simple scripting language, like LabView’s C subset, that could take arguments out of cells, and write to cells, would be welcome. VBA has too much gobbledegook for a user like me. Python could also be embedded.

I think LibreOffice uses Python as the scripting language, but you would have to fact check me. There is a company called DataNitro that sells a Python add-on for Excell which allows you to use Python instead of VBA. It works pretty well, but I no longer use it.

LibreOffice supports BASIC (a version of StarBasic), Python and JavaScript (Mozilla's Rhino engine).
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