> "Their are ways to develop Office add-ins using .NET, but they aren't built in the way VBA and its IDE are." It's also worth noting that you can build custom

> "Their are ways to develop Office add-ins using .NET, but they aren't built in the way VBA and its IDE are." It's also worth noting that you can build custom tools in Office using web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS). Also, there are also a number of options other than Excel formulas and VBA for manipulating Excel data, including DAX and M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_analysis_expressions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_analysis_expressions https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270258.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270258.aspx M's syntax is kind of similar to F#/Ocaml. The only downside is the editor (very basic). All of the above are built into Excel. If I was starting out building an Excel add on, I'd use the web technologies option.