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Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

dev.office.com

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Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#11

Post by josephg »

sevensor wrote: post #3

> 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?

> It saddens me that this is a thing we want Javascript for.

It might be a small comfort, but Javascript is getting arbitrary precision integer support this year:

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-bigint

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#13

Post by sevensor »

Maybestring wrote: post #7
sevensor wrote: post #3

> 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?

Power Query M

My, that's nifty! Sad I've overlooked it, happy that it exists.

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#15

Post by redleggedfrog »

cremp wrote: post #10

I can't wait to see how this is exploited in a few hours...

I think voting this down is unfair. That's the first thing I thought of when they mentioned "bank balance." Well, then there's credentials. Now it's complicated, and complicated and Javascript are a recipe for disaster.

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#16

Post by erichdongubler »

Ftuuky wrote: post #6
realslimjd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never promised Python support.

I think they were considering it, they even sent out a survey. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

That's...very different from making a promise, though.

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#17

Post by sevensor »

riskneutral wrote: post #9
sevensor wrote: post #3

> 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?

RTDServer

Thanks for this -- I have some COM automation that would greatly benefit from RTDServer, now that I know about it.

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#18

Post by Ftuuky »

erichdongubler wrote: post #16
Ftuuky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they were considering it, they even sent out a survey. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

That's...very different from making a promise, though.

You're right. But since the feedback to their survey was so positive, I was really expecting it.

Re: Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

#19

Post by chatmasta »

Microsoft has been doing great work in opening up their software the past couple years. For anyone interested in this, I suggest taking some time to read through Microsoft's Office Platform docs [0]. Quite a lot is possible. The plugin API is really clean and you can create javascript plugins for any office product, where you basically run a "website" in a frame within the office product, and the code in the "website" has access to the office API.

I haven't used it myself yet but am planning on using it in a project I'm working on currently. I'm building a questionnaire creator that can auto merge into docx files by using comments as merge keys (you highlight where you want to merge and leave a comment, then in the web UI where you build the questionnaire, you associate each form field with a comment in the uploaded docx file). At some point I would like to convert this to use the office API, which would enable a lot of cool features for converting a docx form into a questionnaire.

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/plat...

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