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Excel Functions in F# Language

sharpcells.com

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Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#31

Post by japanman425 »

xupybd wrote: post #28

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.

What industry are you in? I’ve never found a need for it (probably quite rightly just writing crud apps…)

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#32

Post by airstrike »

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/...

Writing an XLL add-in is a terrible pain I wish on no one at all. The documentation is all over the place, terribly outdated and generally an aggravating process to try to learn it from scratch

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#34

Post by gigatexal »

xupybd wrote: post #28

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.

Contact them. For corporates I’m sure they could work something out.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#35

Post by joenathanone »

DoctorOW wrote: post #9

I've done some VBA for work. If I build an Excel file with SharpCells and send them to someone who doesn't have it. What happens when they open it? From what I understand, .NET is pretty easy to decompile. Is it possible to make a SharpCells F# to VBA translation before saving?

Microsoft is currently doing about everything they can to kill VBA.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#36

Post by xupybd »

japanman425 wrote: post #31
xupybd wrote: post #28

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.

What industry are you in? I’ve never found a need for it (probably quite rightly just writing crud apps…)

I'm in B2B manufacturing. We are abusing Excel no one should use it for what we do.

We have a spreadsheet that takes information from online orders into input cells. Then it has lines that if they calculate a qty of 1 or greater get consumed by CAM software. The product then gets sent to the appropriate machining center. Not a single line of VB. There are a few things that I could extract into custom formulas that would remove pages and pages of Excel formulas. However the entire point of the Excel setup is so that product experts not programmers can edit them.

We currently have F# in our internal tools. We have a couple of CRUD apps on the SAFE stack. A few ETL tasks in F#. The bug count seems to be much lower when using F#.

There is some legacy stuff in PHP, JAVA and C#.

Then we have an online store in C# but that is just using an open source tool NopCommerce. I couldn't recommend that highly enough. It has been amazing compared to everything I've worked with in the past.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#37

Post by sharpcells »

xupybd wrote: post #28

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.

Sharp Cells creator here. If you reach out on our contact us page https://www.sharpcells.com/contact-us we'd be happy to discuss special arrangements.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#38

Post by sharpcells »

DoctorOW wrote: post #9

I've done some VBA for work. If I build an Excel file with SharpCells and send them to someone who doesn't have it. What happens when they open it? From what I understand, .NET is pretty easy to decompile. Is it possible to make a SharpCells F# to VBA translation before saving?

An F# to VBA translation would be very difficult. The languages are very different and F# relies heavily on the .NET runtime which VBA does not use.

When you use Sharp Cells the F# scripts are embedded with the workbook when you save so sending the .xlsx will work for the recipient provided they also have Sharp Cells installed. For many workbooks the free tier would be sufficient for use.

If the user doesn't have Sharp Cells the functions won't load and the results relying on Sharp Cells UDFs will be replaced with `#NAME?` errors.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#39

Post by sharpcells »

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/...

We use those APIs internally to implement Sharp Cells. You can certainly build your own integration however the XLL API in particular was poorly documented and very difficult to implement correctly.

Sharp Cells' aim is to make it easy to use these APIs from F# so you don't have to worry about P/Invoke, manual memory management, dynamic .NET assembly loading, etc. to just write custom functions.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#40

Post by sharpcells »

andix wrote: post #19

Interesting that it is F# only, usually .NET based products can also use C# and VB.NET. Especially VB.NET could be useful when porting VBA code.

We would say it is F# first. We found F# to be far superior as a scripting language and so focused on that integration. Projects written in C# or VB.NET can be referenced using the `#r` syntax as shown here https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/example-ref-proj
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