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Excel Functions in F# Language

sharpcells.com

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Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#21

Post by cjohnson318 »

libraryatnight wrote: post #18
cjohnson318 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me when Excel doesn't randomly insist that things are dates.

I recall opening a csv of user data in excel, and one particular user had a username of april0204 (can't recall the actual number but you get the idea). It took me a moment longer than I care to admit to realize what had happened as i stared at the random date in the middle of my username column

A while ago I got some Excel CSV exports that I couldn't read as I normally do. I tried several formats that I knew were associated with Windows systems. I ended up looking at the raw bytes and I noticed that every other byte was something like 0x00, so I wrote a script to strip all of that out. Several weeks later I figured out that I had been looking at utf-16. Derp.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#23

Post by eggy »

Glad to see F# vs. C#. I prefer F# and it doesn't get as much play as C#.

But, being more of a Lisper, I've already subscribed to Acceλerate for Microsoft 365[1]. It's basically a full scheme available in Excel with VSA (Visual Scheme for Applications - nice play on VBA to dupe the unaware ;) ). It has a full REPL and an editor and also creates UDFs. It is Excel's new Lambda on steroids.

I'll have to try Sharp Cells. I've played with J[2] and some Excel tie-in scripts, but it is not integrated as nicely as Sharp Cells or Acceλerate.

[1] https://apexdatasolutions.com/home

[2] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Scripts/OLEExcel

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#24

Post by listenallyall »

rwhaling wrote: post #16

Really cool - the stuff they are doing with the Excel API to inspect editing modes is super interesting: https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/blog/monitoring-edit-mode I work with data warehouses, but I'm really jealous of the way our Finance team uses some abysmal plugin to directly query our GL from inside Excel - building something like that the can make the contents of a modern data warehouse available to Excel users…

Can't be that abysmal if you're jealous of it and is similar to your idea of a holy grail. Is it Jedox perhaps?

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#25

Post by matt3D »

rwhaling wrote: post #16

Really cool - the stuff they are doing with the Excel API to inspect editing modes is super interesting: https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/blog/monitoring-edit-mode I work with data warehouses, but I'm really jealous of the way our Finance team uses some abysmal plugin to directly query our GL from inside Excel - building something like that the can make the contents of a modern data warehouse available to Excel users…

I think PowerQuery largely solves this problem

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#26

Post by inglor »

rwhaling wrote: post #16

Really cool - the stuff they are doing with the Excel API to inspect editing modes is super interesting: https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/blog/monitoring-edit-mode I work with data warehouses, but I'm really jealous of the way our Finance team uses some abysmal plugin to directly query our GL from inside Excel - building something like that the can make the contents of a modern data warehouse available to Excel users…

You can both feed SQL data sources into Excel and expose Excel as an ODBC data source (natively, usable today and used by a lot of companies!)

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#28

Post by xupybd »

We use F# and Excel as our main tools. This seems like a product made in heaven.

But this would never fly for us. The pricing model could not be sold to management.

What would work is if it was something like $5k for a year of updates. We're on 365 so office's constant updates would force us to upgrade every year. But management would not feel like they're renting something they would rather own.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#29

Post by ripley12 »

inglor wrote: post #15
inglor wrote: post #13

I work on Excel and this is really cool and I’ll share it with the rest of the engineers.

Team says it’s cool and already possible with different us through https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/ex... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

I mean... sorta. It's not easy to write a Office add-in just using the C API, and when I tried a year or two ago the only example code I could find was like 20 years old and all documentation was heavily pushing people toward the newer JS-based add-ins.

I quit that job because the extensibility story for Excel was so painful (but they had good business reasons for being in the space), sigh.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#30

Post by japanman425 »

eggy wrote: post #23

Glad to see F# vs. C#. I prefer F# and it doesn't get as much play as C#. But, being more of a Lisper, I've already subscribed to Acceλerate for Microsoft 365[1]. It's basically a full scheme available in Excel with VSA (Visual Scheme for Applications - nice play on VBA to dupe the unaware ;) ). It has a full REPL and an editor and also creates UDFs. It is Excel's new Lambda on steroids. I'll have to try Sharp Cells.…

Have you ever used F# in production?
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