[HN Gopher] Excel Functions in F# Language ___________________________________________________________________ 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/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-02-14 23:00 UTC)