[HN Gopher] Excel Functions in F# Language
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Excel Functions in F# Language
Author : t0m44c
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-02-13 10:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sharpcells.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sharpcells.com)
| DoctorOW wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| VBA is the old win32/COM-based Visual Basic, not .NET, so that
| might be difficult.
|
| I agree that the non-portability of such Excel extensions is a
| showstopper for many use cases.
| eggy wrote:
| 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
| Accelerate 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 Accelerate.
|
| [1] https://apexdatasolutions.com/home
|
| [2] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Scripts/OLEExcel
| rwhaling wrote:
| 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
| has always been a holy grail for me.
|
| My hunch is that exposing free-form SQL in Excel doesn't work,
| but something more like structured metrics (something roughly
| like dbt metrics) could potentially work? And tooling like this
| is probably what I'd want to prototype with.
| inglor wrote:
| 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!)
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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?
| matt3D wrote:
| I think PowerQuery largely solves this problem
| layer8 wrote:
| How do they implement the subscription plans when no internet
| connection is required?
| velcrovan wrote:
| Call me when Excel "programs" don't silently give corrupted
| output when a formula or critical input is accidentally clobbered
| by a keypress.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Call me when Excel doesn't randomly insist that things are
| dates.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| 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
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| giaour wrote:
| Why is this a subscription?
| andix wrote:
| Because the author wants to generate a continuous stream of
| revenue?
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| There are plenty of alternatives if you want something less
| commercial. ExcelDna is a great choice.
| inglor wrote:
| I work on Excel and this is really cool and I'll share it with
| the rest of the engineers.
| inglor wrote:
| 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/...
| andix wrote:
| 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.
| lsm07 wrote:
| I'm always happy to see F# get a mention, but using it inside
| Excel seems funny when you could just use it against a raw CSV
| file or whatever for data analysis/data manipulation.
| Idiot_in_Vain wrote:
| Excel is a lot more user friendly interface for data
| analysis/manipulation, than a raw CSV file.
| coldacid wrote:
| It's not for people like us who even know what a CSV is, it's
| for people who have some scripting/programming knowledge, but
| mainly live in Excel all day.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Plenty of people who _do_ know what a CSV is still sometimes
| (or frequently) use Excel, either for their own work or as a
| sort of "data app" that they can distribute to coworkers.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| nice!
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Ah, at first I thought that was a library that implemented Excel
| functions in F#.
| Nelkins wrote:
| Nice use of F# scripting. The #r directive for Nuget packages was
| a great addition.
| bsdooby wrote:
| An interesting F# blog that was found for me:
| https://www.planetgeek.ch/
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