I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may.

I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation.

The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are:

- process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq

- move data between Excel and databases

- fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code)

- replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation

It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage.

It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com.

I posted about it a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488

Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594

Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps.

My first heavy use of Excel was in a thermodynamics class in college. We modeled heat gradients for various HVAC systems with Excel. After that, I used it to calculate stresses and strains of different structures using each cell as a node in finite element analysis model.

I did something like this in 2002 for a VFX house; but it was loading a DLL that hot loaded other DLLs, queried the routines and exposed them as Excel functions. Through that I pulled in a stochastic modeling framework I wrote, and pulled in 5 years of the studio's timecard records to create a production forecasting system, right down to selecting the correct staff for each position, with backup people, for 1200 digital artists. The Excel "spreadheet" was something like 250 MB when saved with a film production in it.

Yes, I saw your tool before. I recommended it to somebody a couple months ago and they're very happy with it for their use case.

It is brave of you to integrate directly with Excel, and I commend you for that. Maybe some day I will work up the courage to do something other than basic one-way import.

.NET and ODBC already provide C# and SQL, no?

Yes...but. You can't do a SQL join between the data in an excel table and a remote database via a nice GUI front end using just .NET and ODBC. I am evaluating this product at the moment, and it looks really useful for Finance/analyst types

Interesting: optimized for integration is what I've been doing too. If you've got a minute to take a look at the links in my profile I'd be keen to hear your feedback.

This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?

This looks similar

https://github.com/dgorissen/pycel

or perhaps

https://github.com/xuri/efp

Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.

Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/?

That's quite cool, thanks for the link. Tables seem to be a more popular model for finance and similar, but it's always interesting to see new data models like this.

This could allow for more interesting things like gathering fields from records into a meta-table from a relational DB, that would definitely be a valuable next step.

Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful

Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.

Mathematical functions, easy formatting, and more anything a purpose. Basically it does thinga you don't want a spreadsheet to do. It's more akin to a mind mapper and there are easier to use tools for that.

It’s a good foundation for future open-source development, uses wxWidgets toolkit for cross-platform desktops. Author has graphics background, now busy at BigCo.

Is there a github or similar I can watch?

After seeing the level of interest here, I set up a (tentative) github org where I'll put the repo for the evaluator when it has some reasonable subset of the desired functionality.

https://github.com/exorgan