Re:You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
by taylodl on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @11:36AM
(#7804985)
That's why I always thought it'd be a good idea for Microsoft to expose such a semantic layer via a .NET API. When you can program an Excel sheet using the .NET languages and have access to the broader .NET libraries then all kinds of interesting possibilities start to open up. The fact is business users love Excel and a great number of CRUD applications could be easily built on top of Excel if only we had a reasonable programming environment (keep the VBA, you could create a VBA implementation on top of .NET). That would be win/win for everyone!
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Re:You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
by daigoba66 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:05PM
(#7805147)
I always got the feeling the Office team and .NET team never got along well considering the completely lack of cohesion between _any_ of their respective products.
Re:You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
by jeromesalimao on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @07:06AM
(#7809311)
Microsoft VSTO can be used to build office addins and extensions. Meaning you can code in any CLR language. C#, VB, C++ presumably.
"Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) uses unmanaged code that is tightly integrated with Office applications. Microsoft Office projects created by using Visual Studio enable you to take advantage of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio design tools."
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/vstudio/ss11825b.aspx - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/vstudio/bb386107.aspx - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hh133430.aspx
Probably worth a look. I worked at an iBank previously and we were investigating when/how we could start using VSTO more..
Re:You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
by blendo on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @01:51PM
(#7805788)
I used to work on finance spreadsheets that used VBA to perform ftp, connect to https servers to download and parse xml docs, perform file renaming, etc. Horrid, but functional. If MS shipped Excel with C# as a VBA co-equal, the reliability of these kinds of "hacks" would increase ten-fold.