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Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel

670 points by anakic 4y ago

The project is called QueryStorm. It uses Roslyn to offer C# (and VB.NET) support in Excel, as an alternative to VBA. I've posted about it before, but a lot has changed since then so figured I'd share an update. The current version includes a host of new features, namely a C# debugger, support for NuGet packages, and the ability to publish Excel extensions to an "AppStore" (which is essentially a NuGet repository). The AppStore can be used by anyone with the (free) runtime component. Another great addition is the community license, which is a free license for individuals and small companies to use. It unlocks most features, but it isn't intended for companies with more than 5 employees or over $1M in annual revenue. I would love to hear your feedback and am happy to answer any technical questions about how QueryStorm is implemented.

MOONS16 4y ago
Yil
PeterRoschke 4y ago
This is really cool. For context, We have a tool that compiles complex Excel files into highly optimized WebAssembly.. which is great for dealing with those 2M formula files that take 10 minutes to open. We can replace all of that automatically with an API that can be called from any programming language or even a "hollowed out" version of the Excel itself. However, replacing the functions on the VBA front is trickier. This is no longer pure functional programming, but essentially an application / data integration pipeline that wraps the formula logic. For MSFT, VBA is a dead-end for a variety of technical and business reasons ... unfortunately the current alternatives in Excel (Typescpript Add-ins, ScriptLab, OfficeScripts and lambda) all have some shortcomings. MSFT still hasn't quite gotten it right. As a result some financials have tried moving out of Excel entirely and into things like Python... but those projects either fail outright or reach a steady state of about 10%-30% complete as it becomes clear that you can't replace SMEs with a IT development team and keep up with maintenance and business changes in thousands of files. Anyway - we have a few clients standing in-front of a few hundred/thousand Excel "Applications" some of which could use a modern, Excel centric IDE and runtime. Would love to chat with you and see if we can help them out together. Look me up on LinkedIn.
deleted 4y ago
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paxcoder 4y ago
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HeckFeck 4y ago
Very cool. Should be a part of Excel tbh. LINQ is much better suited for data munging than JavaScript.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  F# is even better.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Maybe, but I think C# has the advantage that "everyone" knows it or Java so it is trivial to get started. Last I checked, admittedly a couple of years ago, starting with F# wasn't absolutely trivial.
    - eckza 4y ago
      It is, if you know where to look. Therein lies the problem. The language doesn't have much marketshare, and few champions. I just finished reading Scott Wlaschin's Domain Driven Design for Functional Programmers and it's an incredible, batteries-included guide that goes from "hello world" to "and here's how you use it in an organization" in a few hundred pages. I wish I had been exposed to it about a decade ago. Incredibly easy to follow and well-explained.
      - fsloth 4y ago
        This! Other good books are ”Expert F#” by Granicz, Syme & Cisternino, ”Real world functional programming” by Petricek and ”F# for scientists” by Harrop. The last is old but still really great in succintly explaining what ’new&unfamiliar’ structures in F# are great for pragmatic software engineering. Why is there so little noise in F# land? I have no data, but I can guess that the language is so unproblematic that everybody is just happily coding instead of explaining how to fix something. It’s also not very good at guis so there is usually nothing visual to demonstrate.
        grugagag 4y ago
ragebol 4y ago
No questions, just complimenting on what looks like a great, very very useful product.
- anakic 4y ago
  Many thanks!
andysinclair 4y ago
Looks great, will give it a try (as a fellow Excel developer). One small point: on your webpage the "Try QueryStorm out" button on the "Start a free trial" panel just points to: https://querystorm.com/csharp-in-excel/ https://querystorm.com/csharp-in-excel/ rather than the generate key page.
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks, good catch!
petepete 4y ago
Hey Anakic, I remember posting a link to ThingieQuery here many years ago (2016 maybe?). Glad to see it's gone from strength to strength!
- anakic 4y ago
  Yeah, ThingieQuerie it was called back then:) Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!
keithalewis 4y ago
Does this use https://excel-dna.net/ https://excel-dna.net/ behind the scenes?
- anakic 4y ago
  Yeah, the runtime component is an ExcelDNA addin. The IDE component is a VSTO addin. Since VSTO doesn't allow defining custom functions I switched to using ExcelDNA for the runtime.
  - keithalewis 4y ago
    Please consider acknowledging that on your website.
    - anakic 4y ago
      I would love to but I'm a bit scared to fiddle with the post now while it's trending. I think it's mentioned in a few places on the website, but not in this blog post. I do also use a bunch of other libraries, but yeah, ExcelDNA is one of the critical ones so mentioning it would be in order.
  - andysinclair 4y ago
    What did you use to write the installer, and how do you determine if the targeted version of Excel is 32 or 64 bit? I've built an Excel-DNA based Add-in (https://www.excelpricefeed.com/ https://www.excelpricefeed.com/) and distribute it via an installer built using Advanced Installer. It works well, the only real pain point is the the user has to find out which version of Excel they have installed in order to choose the correct download (32 or 64 bit).
    - keithalewis 4y ago
      See https://github.com/xlladdins/xlladdin/blob/master/ThisAddIn.cs https://github.com/xlladdins/xlladdin/blob/master/ThisAddIn....
    - 4y ago
ycuser2 4y ago
I would have used the hell out of it 8 years ago! VBA IDE was a pain. Great work!
kungfufrog 4y ago
Will this only work on Excel running on Windows 10/11 X64?
- anakic 4y ago
  It works on Excel 2013 onwards but only on Windows. Both x86 and x64 are supported. Mac isn't supported I'm afraid.
  - kungfufrog 4y ago
    Show stopper for me, but can I just say what a fantastic product and the article introducing it kept me hooked to the end!
    - anakic 4y ago
      I have to do my own marketing, so I'm trying to blog more often these days. Really glad to hear you enjoyed the writing!
  - throwaway90650 4y ago
    Is there a technical blocker on macOS Excel side that prevents you from implementing it, or is it just a matter of priorities?
    - anakic 4y ago
      A bit of both. On the Windows side I can use VSTO or ExcelDNA to integrate with Excel, but neither is available on the Mac. One alternative I'd like to try is a web-based version which would use Blazor and the Monaco editor but I'm really not sure if that would be at all doable. I don't have the time to go there at the moment, but I'd love to try at some point.
OJFord 4y ago
Oh a plug-in, ha, for some reason I read the title and thought this was a 'just to show I can' type implementation of all those things actually in Excel, 'Doom in Excel' sort of thing. This seems far more useful!
- whoisthemachine 4y ago
  I also thought this was going to be an article about implementing a C# compiler in excel! This on the other hand seems like a very neat product.
  - anakic 4y ago
    Thanks! Yeah, I probably should have made the title "...in Excel" instead of "...inside Excel". I wonder if more or fewer people would have clicked on it that way.
    - maxfurman 4y ago
      If we're being pedantic maybe "for Excel" would be clearer? But what do I know.
      - hoseja 4y ago
        That would be my choice too. Both "inside" and "in" imply "in the spreadsheet". "For", on the other hand I would understand as "for the Excel program".
      - anakic 4y ago
        I was considering "for" but I wanted to imply that the IDE is actually located inside Excel, rather than being a separate program.
        Jorengarenar 4y ago
        "working inside"?
    - 4y ago
barrenko 4y ago
This is pretty mad.
denismurphy 4y ago
Hats off @anakic this is class! It would be a game-changer if Microsoft licensed QueryStorm built in to Excel. Let's hope the right people at Microsoft are paying attention to you.
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks! Wouldn't mind that outcome one bit. It's hard to get exposure and adoption for a platform like this without some serious muscle backing it. I suspect Microsoft has its sights set on the cloud, though, but still, it would be amazing if they adopted QueryStorm.
cm2187 4y ago
Microsoft actually built that already, then they decided to kill it. It was called VSTA (not to be confused with VSTO). It shipped with one of the apps of Office 2007.
- anakic 4y ago
  At first I thought you were referring to VSTO, then I saw the "not to be confused with VSTO" part. I had no idea this ever existed. Thanks for mentioning it. I wonder why they decided to pull the plug back then.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    I suspect it must have been part of "let's try to secure / lockdown office", "users writing codes is bad, they should only push buttons", and at the same time they tried to make it as hard as possible to use VBA (all sorts of warnings and things disabled by default, etc) I am also aware of a commercial product that offers a .net IDE to be embeded into your software, though I never tried it: https://www.alternetsoft.com/products/scripter https://www.alternetsoft.com/products/scripter
  - kleiba 4y ago
    Funnily, QueryStorm uses VSTO behind the scenes: the IDE component is a VSTO addin.
samsquire 4y ago
This is absolutely awesome. The combination of a spreadsheet, database and data scripting runtime would be extremely powerful. This is where Airtable, nocodb and baserow are candidates. I worked at a company that used gridgain with Excel as a cluster to process models on lots of servers. I suspect there's a lot of low level Windows integration details about how to integrate with Excel. COM objects and DLLs. Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it. How you design software that is extensible? Atom was extensible and VS Code is less so. Why has nobody integrated the web browser with QT? So we can browse into a Qt application. So you can create desktop widgets and canvases with Qt from Javascript? That way you could ship desktop software and arbitrary integrations to software.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it. I feel it's because of inherent conflict of interests and priorities. A software product can provide services to the user, or provide services to other programs. It's rare to see one that does both, because the two goals seem often at odds. Say you're writing a software component for other programs to use. You probably have some specific programs in mind, some of which are end-user-facing. In this case, you may not want to spend resources on developing user-facing UI and features that make your product usable stand-alone - you'd likely end up competing with your own customers. Say you're writing user-facing software instead. You want to own the entire user experience. Mixing UI, user interaction and the "business problem"-solving code together lets you work faster. Also, you don't want to make it easy for anyone to integrate with the core of your software, because that would be inviting competitors to own the user experience while using your own backend, ruining all kinds of marketing shenanigans you'd rather play on your users. I don't like this, but I see there's a mix of both reasonable and greedy reasons why software isn't developed with integration in mind. The major exception here is when the platform on which the software runs encourages, insists on, or demands the software to allow for integration. Windows does that to an extent with COM / DCOM. Emacs does that by its nature. But it's only moving the problem one level up - e.g. Microsoft environment can't integrate well with Apple environment.
- brendank310 4y ago
inglor 4y ago
I work on Excel at Microsoft and this is really cool. I’ll check it out and share it with the rest of the R&D.
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks, that's great!! <3
- keithalewis 4y ago
  Please tell Satya to show the ancient C SDK a little love. I'd hate to see this disappear: https://github.com/xlladdins/xll#fp-data-type https://github.com/xlladdins/xll#fp-data-type
- andysinclair 4y ago
  Do you know if this item from the Microsoft 365 roadmap would stop Add-ins (xll files) like this from working? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=115485 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... I also have a vested interest as one of my software products is an xll Add-in. Any further details from Microsoft would be most welcome, thanks.
  - anakic 4y ago
    No idea, haven't seen this until now. Hopefully they provide a mechanism for allowing legitimate addins to get around it. Perhaps using a code signing cert (which I do) or an EV certificate would be appropriate. Security has been a bit of nightmare with Excel addins. I've had to deal with false positives on and off again a bunch of times already. First it was windows smart screen, then antivirus vendors every so often. It's a slog...
    - tech234a 4y ago
      Typically you can go into the file properties and check the “Unblock” checkbox to remove what Microsoft calls the “Mark of the Web”.
  - 4y ago
major505 4y ago
this is.... awesome.
major505 4y ago
Now I can use excel. I always sucked doing stuff in excell formulas. With this now I can just linq and spit the info I need.
- viggity 4y ago
  devs "hate" excel because you have to reference by col/row (C10 = tax rate, etc). But few devs know that you can name cells (and ranges and tables). Just to the left of the formula bar you'll see a textbox with the default name of the cell (C10). Just delete C10 and call it "tax_rate" and now you can reference "tax_rate" in all your formulas.
  - major505 4y ago
    I did a lot of shit in excell using vb. Even spreadsheets connected to SAP using COM+ dlls. But still sucks having to do requests in VB.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Now sure how known this is, but Excel 365 for Business / Enterprise supports Office Scripts (under a "Automate" tab), where you can create scripts in TypeScript. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overvie... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/scripting-fundamentals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop...
  - gompertz 4y ago
    I just started writing Typescript in Excel. It's really surprising this hasn't taken off more. It works very well, but is only available on Excel Web (not Desktop) application.
actionfromafar 4y ago
Find a way to connect this to Zapier and the Universe might open up a wormhole.
anton_ai 4y ago
Installed :)
samstave 4y ago
Beautiful. So can people upload their code snips to the appstore such that, say, a marketing data analytics person with no coding experience can pay to get 'buttons' to run queries that are relevant to their needs? like the salaries example, for example, I used to spend a shit-ton of time educating a CFO on AWS spends in excel. If I could have a code snip 'button' to use some AWS-CLI creds to pull results directly from AWS asa "CFO BUTTON" and set them up with an easy export to an XLS - and then let them build their own dash to their choice that would be cool. I havent looked at Cloudability in quite a while, (know the founder) -- but giving a CFO-type an excel button... Every CFO can navigate excel. so they get an invisible tool that empowers them, and relieves stress on the Ops team...
- anakic 4y ago
  Yep, that's the idea. You create a project that defines some custom functions, ribbon commands, context menus, shortcuts etc... and then publish it to a store. Then anyone who has the QueryStorm Runtime (and the url of the store you published to) can install it through the "Extensions" dialog. I haven't yet set up the ability to charge for packages but I plan on offering this. I first need a community of users, so didn't focus on charging yet. If you'd like some help setting up something like that AWS scenario, reach me via email: antonio [at] querystorm.com, I've done several such integrations already (Google analytics, Monday.com, TSheets, Google drive).
cobrabyte 4y ago
This is excellent. Great work!
T3RMINATED 4y ago
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gadders 4y ago
Good work, but this is depressing: "VBA is a bit (a lot) behind the times and Microsoft isn’t planning on upgrading it. Instead, they’re offering a sandboxed JavaScript environment called Office Scripts." Microsoft - Just swap VBA for Python ffs.
- qiqitori 4y ago
  There's a lot of people who only know VBA (in terms of programming languages), and there's a huge amount of VBA code in production out there. Microsoft won't make itself popular by replacing VBA for some silly technical reason, especially not because the syntax is perceived to look better. It's a bit like renaming the SUM function to ADD and expecting everyone to rewrite their formulas.
nycdotnet 4y ago
Looks awesome. One fundamental issue I always faced with Excel calculations of any kind (formulas or vba) is the lack of ability to source control cleanly (binary format plus data and code are intermingled). This weakness is the other side of the spreadsheet’s greatest strength which is low friction experimentation with data. Does this product attempt to do anything here?
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks! You can version control the code you write with QueryStorm, to an extent. There are basically two kinds of apps you can build with this: extension apps (where you build general excel functionality) and workbook apps (where you automate a particular workbook). The code for extension apps is stored in a folder on your machine, and you can version control that easily. The code for workbook apps is stored inside workbooks. While there's no version control functionality in QueryStorm, it does let you export code from a workbook into a folder, as well as import code from a folder into a workbook project. There are context menu commands for this in the code explorer pane. This lets you decouple the code from the workbook. Basically, for version controlling code in a workbook, you'd have to export the code into a folder and version control it there. Exporting into a folder will clear everything from the folder except hidden stuff like the ".git" folder so your git repository will be safe. Not a perfect solution, but it can be done.
  - whitemary 4y ago
    Can you also import it from the folder?
    - anakic 4y ago
      Yeah, you can import the folder back into the project and it will replace all of the existing files with the ones from the folder.
  - cxr 4y ago
    Since XLSX etc. use Microsoft's Open Packaging Convention (a ZIP container consisting of mostly plain text), consider adding native support for unpacking and normalizing the payloads so they can be trivially diffed by existing source control systems.
ckluis 4y ago
I clicked on resellers & affiliates because I was curious about your terms. They are both empty.
- anakic 4y ago
  Yeah, didn't get around to populating those yet. One-man show, so things slip by... ComponentSource is currently the only reseller: https://www.componentsource.com/product/querystorm-plugin https://www.componentsource.com/product/querystorm-plugin Thanks for the heads up!
  - ckluis 4y ago
    Let me know if you want to chat about sales/marketing linkedin.com/in/ckluis
gwbas1c 4y ago
I tried clicking on the animation to make it bigger, but the larger image doesn't load. I'm using the Brave browser.
- layer8 4y ago
  Same on FireFox.
  - anakic 4y ago
    Yeah, I just checked and it fails on some gifs for me as well (but works on others for some reason). I'll leave it as is for now, best not fiddle with it while this post is trending.
mcdonje 4y ago
Really cool. I could see MS jumping on this because of their strong association with C#. That said, I think the ideal replacement for VB & VBA in most contexts is python. The reason is they're both high level languages with ease of learning as a selling point. Python has a massive userbase, and there is significant overlap of python and MS Office tools. Data analysts who have to deal with Excel & SQL Server are much more likely to know python than any other language outside of SQL. It seems like python has pretty much locked up the spaces that VB was designed for.
- kab0b 4y ago
  I thought I remember hearing like 4 or 5 years ago that MS was planning on replacing VBA with Python Support in Office apps. But I can't find anything to back that up, so maybe I just had a really wishful dream.
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    They might have some involvement in python libraries or tooling to interact with excel files from python apps, but the default programming support within excel is still VBA. They did add a javascript API, but getting that up and running is a job geared more for a dev than a data analyst. What I think they should do is not just make a python API, but replace VBA with it, and expose it to end users where VBA is currently exposed. Python should be the language of macros and user defined functions.
    - raarts 4y ago
      I tried to find info on how to set that up a while ago, but found nothing. The Microsoft pages gave me the impression it only works for the web version. Akso I'm on MacOS - couldn't find any mention of that either.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      They should dust off Windows Scripting Host and use that as the nexus for Office app scripting.
orbit7 4y ago
Impressive, Excel would benefit having this built in
chinupbuttercup 4y ago
Would this work with Excel for the Mac as well or is primarily a Windows thing? Somehow, while good, I feel like Excel for Mac just isn't as good as Excel for Windows.
- anakic 4y ago
  Unfortunately, no. Excel for Mac doesn't support either of the two technologies QueryStorm uses to talk to Excel (namely VSTO and ExcelDNA). Might be possible to build something that would work across all plaforms using Blazor and the Monaco editor, but that would be another huge project.
  - btown 4y ago
    I wish that someone would make a Wine-style compatibility library that would run a local websocket server that communicates with a lightweight Add-In using the new cross-platform JS APIs for Excel, and translates VSTO/COM calls into IPC messages that are processed and responded to. Then you could bring all the old VSTO tools into the modern world, running in a separate process from Excel. This is... rather daunting to even think about. Arguably Apple should sponsor the project as a way to bring the world of finance towards using Macs!
brushfoot 4y ago
This is excellent. I can see buying it for my business. We already use Excel extensively for the open file format; that it's local first; that it's just a file; the low ceremony of getting started; the multipurpose grid for code, data, and presentation; the ubiquity. The more low-code/no-code SaaS products I've tried, the more I value it. LC/NC SaaS generally is expensive and inflexible. Everybody knows Excel, it's dirt cheap, and it just works. It's part of a certain IT subculture to bash it, but I stopped laughing along. Excel is great at what it does. Love seeing clean solutions like this that give it even more muscle.
- beached_whale 4y ago
  I love how approachable it is. Domain experts in other fields are able to program in excel and codify their knowledge. While, not always great in terms of code quality, often it is bad, it still provides a great starting point in moving to something more resilient and safer in terms of data validation. There is a reason it is the worlds most poplar programming language
  - redavni 4y ago
    "most poplar programming language" In your opineion.
    - indrora 4y ago
      Not just in one HN'ers opinion. The thing is: Excel is one part data store and one part programming interface. The programming interface just happens to be a part of the data store. This leads people who have been told they're not allowed to program to solve the problem with the best tool they can hold: Excel. I once got an email in my inbox that had the subject "Help: recommendations for machine to run Excel". The body described a person within a business unit who had a laptop, ca. 2018, with a then current I7, 32G of RAM, dual raid10 SSDs, and it had one job: Open, edit, and evaluate one 5+GB Excel workbook. This workbook took twenty minutes to open. It's so bad Microsoft actually gave some level of proper functional programming to Excel: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/04/microsoft_excel_lambda/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/04/microsoft_excel_lambd... What happens is this pattern where more applicable programming models are taken from business folk, who need a way to do some level of broad, tabular accounting usually. These individuals don't have Python, don't know Python, or web applications, etc. What they have is Excel. Excel lets you do something very easily that no other thing in existence lets you do: Real time (ish) calculations against very large sets of data. I can write one cell, `=AVERAGE($A9:$A99)` and get the running average for 90 rows in a table. Imagine the work that would go into doing that in a language like Python or Go, plus the scaffolding to make it work in a webapp. And so when a business unit says "we need a way to do X", inevitably someone says "there's no budget for that" and someone eventually finds their way to Excel. Then they build the thing in Excel and when someone realizes they have a monster on their hands someone inevitably says "this should be a webapp" at which point nobody has the funding to maintain that webapp plus its infrastructure, plus handling the implicit and explicit logic that comes along with the mixture of data, code, and everything else in an Excel spreadsheet.
replwoacause 4y ago
This is such an impressive feat of engineering. Excellent job. I have no doubt this will be a hit. It wouldn't surprise me if MSFT just decided to make you an offer for it.
nielsbosma 4y ago
Love it! Big fan of developer productivity tool like Linqpad.
RektBoy 4y ago
If the user can code in C#, why they need Excel? Exporting to Excel for other non-coder employees, sure why not. I don't understand the use-case, Excel is horrible tool for anything else than stupid, a few hundred rows data science.
- eatsyourtacos 4y ago
  You must not work with any kind of real world data if you think Excel is a horrible tool. Pulling in 1000000000 rows of data you know absolutely nothing about to throw into your ML model and have it spit out some questionable result doesn't mean you actually work with real world data. >a few hundred rows data science. People that work with a few hundred rows are called "almost every office employee ever" and not data scientists. And you are naïve as hell if don't realize how powerful excel is for every random ass thing that happens in the real world.
ChicagoDave 4y ago
Linq in Excel is very interesting.
jbb_hn 4y ago
Wow. As someone that has written a fair amount of VBA in the past, this is a game changer. Impressive feat of integration and I hope you're rewarded for all your efforts. Clearly a passion project!
kinggencha 4y ago
Animations embedded within text are distracting and make the reading experience worse
- anakic 4y ago
  I like that a gifs shows so much in very little space, but I take your point about it being distracting. Regular mp4 videos you can play/pause explicitly might be a better option for the future.
charles_f 4y ago
Looks awesome, and my favorite thing is this: > $379 License + 1yr support Cheers to you for not collecting a recurring fee for a desktop app!
- capableweb 4y ago
  The license is for 1 year of latest versions of the application, after that you'll stop receiving updates. This is pretty common for desktop applications, compared to SaaS.
  - charles_f 4y ago
    It's becoming less and less common, even for desktop applications - which is why I thought this warranted some congratulations
drorco 4y ago
This looks great! In my previous company, we somehow ended up building a whole ERP around Google Sheets. Google Sheets is a very powerful tool, but the JavaScript definitely felt clunky and outdated. A solid C# foundation for building on top of excel could probably be very useful for some companies. I do wonder though how you can nail down a target audience for this kind of tool, seems like you'd need a special kind of tinkerer and I'm not sure how many like that are out there. In my other company, which was a small company, the ones who headed it were essentially engineers that transitioned to executive positions. I doubt there are many like that out there.
ozim 4y ago
Don't show it to my boss, please. It is super cool and would love to play around with it - just not at work :)
rukuu001 4y ago
I remember you back when it was just an SQL plug-in for Excel :) Congrats on building this and sticking with it so long. It’s awesome!
813919 4y ago
This is incredible. I work in industrial automation and I often have to manage / make edits to "point assignment charts" which are essentially Excel Workbooks with 100+ Worksheets, each containing ~10-100 rows of formatted data which define various parameters each real world "point" should have in order to communicate with RTUs / various SCADA nodes. Sometimes the feedback involves making a minor tweak on every Worksheet. Sure you can muck around with VBA (which is a horrible language and experience), but I often just do it manually to get it over with instead (click click click... very tedious). C# is my go-to "business logic" language as a developer, and this looks so well integrated, really excited to use it.
- anakic 4y ago
  Would love to know how you get on with it. If you'd care to share, please to let me know.
  - 813919 4y ago
    Sure! I'll make a reminder to follow up a week from now on my UX. Thanks :)
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "Sometimes the feedback involves making a minor tweak on every Worksheet." Could be a good task for PowerShell and the ImportExcel module[1]. (PowerShell also being a .NET language and written in C#; it has convenient access to COM control of Excel if you can't import the spreadsheet and export an updated version; through $xl = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application ) [1] https://github.com/dfinke/ImportExcel https://github.com/dfinke/ImportExcel
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  You have inherited a crappy database. Export it via ODBC and use more powerful tools.
  - 813919 4y ago
    No not really, it's many projects with many documents, shared among many contractors. You use Excel Workbooks when you work in fields like this. We have it formatted to be pretty too, so we can just publish to PDF via Adobe Acrobat when it's time to send in submittals.
charlieflowers 4y ago
Looks great, but I ran into an issue I'm hoping you can help with. I copy/pasted the very first example from the blog and it doesn't compile. I also have been unable to find the documentation necessary to get past the problem. It's the example that reads the files in a dir and makes an Excel table, and it fails on line 16, which reads `(excel.Selection as Range).WriteTable(files, "myNewTable");`. The error is `Argument 2: cannot convert from 'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<<anonymous type: string File, long Size>>' to 'QueryStorm.Data.ITabular' | ` I can't find docs for WriteTable() [even after finding those gitlab repos that contain QueryStorm docs]. I think anyone trying to run with this, will need access to docs on the API.
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks for trying it and replying back here. It looks like I was using a pre-release version of QueryStorm while I was writing the blog post. I just released that version so if you restart Excel you should get an "Update available" button in the QueryStorm ribbon in Excel. Could you update and post back if that fixed the problem? Another way of "fixing" it would be to replace the following line: (excel.Selection as Range).WriteTable(files, "myNewTable"); with this line: Write(files, "myNewTable"); The Write method is available globally (it's not a method that belongs to a class). This is a trick specific to C# scripts (would be illegal in regular C#). The documentation does lack detail in some areas, which I basically cover by answering questions via email. I do need to invest time every so often to update and extend it.
  - charlieflowers 4y ago
    The update fixed it. Thanks! Look forward to giving it a spin.
waldrews 4y ago
Spectacular. Stats PhD here, I've needed this for years for practical projects in different data science roles. I'd love to talk to you about adding statistics/forecasting capabilities, maybe by exposing some existing libraries with syntactic sugar.
- anakic 4y ago
  Would love to! There's a library called Math.NET that I wanted to look into, but never got around to it (plus, I forgot 99% of the math I learned in college so wouldn't know how to use it). Can you get in touch via email: antonio [at] querystorm.com?
anigbrowl 4y ago
A fine example of what caffeine has done to our great nation's youth. What could have been an obscure command-line interface enjoying a modest but dignified place in the field of traditional operating systems is instead condemned to the gridded prison of automated balance sheets under the beady eyes of our financial overlords. Jokes aside, this is an amazing achievement, the more so for being realized by a single person working away patiently for years - truly inspiring. And it brought out a wave of nostalgia for a former life where I made a living building bespoke tools in the (pre-VBA) Excel macro language. All that and solid business sense too! I hope companies shower Antonio with money, and that Microsoft either leaves him alone or rewards him with gold and the autonomy to lead technical product development for the long term. It's rare to see such a singular combination of vision and execution, doubly so in a very mature product space belonging to a global megacorporation.
emrah 4y ago
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" is a very good sign :)
- anakic 4y ago
  Too bad about 8h of downtime in the middle of it trending, but yeah, can't complain too much about it:)
slenk 4y ago
Aww man, you ran out of bandwidth. May I suggest putting your server behind Cloudflare to help with that? I would offer storage if you want. I have so much extra linode bandwidth
bandyaboot 4y ago
This sounds really impressive.
quickthrower2 4y ago
HN’s loving DDOS has pulled this offline. Any mirrors?
- anakic 4y ago
  Back online now
mandeepj 4y ago
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later." HN kiss of death. Hopefully, you'd be back soon.
- anakic 4y ago
  Yeah:) Of course it happens while I'm asleep. Serves me right for loading the post with so many gifs... Back online now.
kristianp 4y ago
https://archive.is/1w42O https://archive.is/1w42O
- anakic 4y ago
  Oh man, limit happened while I was asleep. Thanks for the stopgap measure. Just got the bandwith limit removed with my hosting provider.
ivan_burazin 4y ago
This is just positivity insane :)
- anakic 4y ago
  Fala, Ivane:)
fazzbuilder 4y ago
I have used QueryStorm since May 2016 back then ThingieQuery. My head exploded from the first moment I saw it considering everything that it integrates and embeds within Excel since for a long time I have resorted to automating routines with ado and vba. Querystorm is more than just a SQL IDE built right into the book and honestly this is the best solution in this environment that every data analyst, self-service developer or business user should give it a try.
thunkshift1 4y ago
You have unlocked the power(utility?) of excel for sooo many people! Msft should buy this from you

670 points by anakic 4y ago

MOONS16 4y ago

Yil

PeterRoschke 4y ago

This is really cool. For context, We have a tool that compiles complex Excel files into highly optimized WebAssembly.. which is great for dealing with those 2M formula files that take 10 minutes to open. We can replace all of that automatically with an API that can be called from any programming language or even a "hollowed out" version of the Excel itself. However, replacing the functions on the VBA front is trickier. This is no longer pure functional programming, but essentially an application / data integration pipeline that wraps the formula logic. For MSFT, VBA is a dead-end for a variety of technical and business reasons ... unfortunately the current alternatives in Excel (Typescpript Add-ins, ScriptLab, OfficeScripts and lambda) all have some shortcomings. MSFT still hasn't quite gotten it right. As a result some financials have tried moving out of Excel entirely and into things like Python... but those projects either fail outright or reach a steady state of about 10%-30% complete as it becomes clear that you can't replace SMEs with a IT development team and keep up with maintenance and business changes in thousands of files. Anyway - we have a few clients standing in-front of a few hundred/thousand Excel "Applications" some of which could use a modern, Excel centric IDE and runtime. Would love to chat with you and see if we can help them out together. Look me up on LinkedIn.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paxcoder 4y ago

[dead]

HeckFeck 4y ago

Very cool. Should be a part of Excel tbh. LINQ is much better suited for data munging than JavaScript.

qwerty456127 4y ago
F# is even better.
- eitland 4y ago
  Maybe, but I think C# has the advantage that "everyone" knows it or Java so it is trivial to get started. Last I checked, admittedly a couple of years ago, starting with F# wasn't absolutely trivial.
  - eckza 4y ago
    It is, if you know where to look. Therein lies the problem. The language doesn't have much marketshare, and few champions. I just finished reading Scott Wlaschin's Domain Driven Design for Functional Programmers and it's an incredible, batteries-included guide that goes from "hello world" to "and here's how you use it in an organization" in a few hundred pages. I wish I had been exposed to it about a decade ago. Incredibly easy to follow and well-explained.
    - fsloth 4y ago
      This! Other good books are ”Expert F#” by Granicz, Syme & Cisternino, ”Real world functional programming” by Petricek and ”F# for scientists” by Harrop. The last is old but still really great in succintly explaining what ’new&unfamiliar’ structures in F# are great for pragmatic software engineering. Why is there so little noise in F# land? I have no data, but I can guess that the language is so unproblematic that everybody is just happily coding instead of explaining how to fix something. It’s also not very good at guis so there is usually nothing visual to demonstrate.
      - grugagag 4y ago

ragebol 4y ago

No questions, just complimenting on what looks like a great, very very useful product.

anakic 4y ago
Many thanks!

andysinclair 4y ago

Looks great, will give it a try (as a fellow Excel developer). One small point: on your webpage the "Try QueryStorm out" button on the "Start a free trial" panel just points to: https://querystorm.com/csharp-in-excel/ https://querystorm.com/csharp-in-excel/ rather than the generate key page.

anakic 4y ago
Thanks, good catch!

petepete 4y ago

Hey Anakic, I remember posting a link to ThingieQuery here many years ago (2016 maybe?). Glad to see it's gone from strength to strength!

anakic 4y ago
Yeah, ThingieQuerie it was called back then:) Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!

keithalewis 4y ago

Does this use https://excel-dna.net/ https://excel-dna.net/ behind the scenes?

anakic 4y ago
Yeah, the runtime component is an ExcelDNA addin. The IDE component is a VSTO addin. Since VSTO doesn't allow defining custom functions I switched to using ExcelDNA for the runtime.
- keithalewis 4y ago
  Please consider acknowledging that on your website.
  - anakic 4y ago
    I would love to but I'm a bit scared to fiddle with the post now while it's trending. I think it's mentioned in a few places on the website, but not in this blog post. I do also use a bunch of other libraries, but yeah, ExcelDNA is one of the critical ones so mentioning it would be in order.
- andysinclair 4y ago
  What did you use to write the installer, and how do you determine if the targeted version of Excel is 32 or 64 bit? I've built an Excel-DNA based Add-in (https://www.excelpricefeed.com/ https://www.excelpricefeed.com/) and distribute it via an installer built using Advanced Installer. It works well, the only real pain point is the the user has to find out which version of Excel they have installed in order to choose the correct download (32 or 64 bit).
  - keithalewis 4y ago
    See https://github.com/xlladdins/xlladdin/blob/master/ThisAddIn.cs https://github.com/xlladdins/xlladdin/blob/master/ThisAddIn....
  - 4y ago

ycuser2 4y ago

I would have used the hell out of it 8 years ago! VBA IDE was a pain. Great work!

kungfufrog 4y ago

Will this only work on Excel running on Windows 10/11 X64?

anakic 4y ago
It works on Excel 2013 onwards but only on Windows. Both x86 and x64 are supported. Mac isn't supported I'm afraid.
- kungfufrog 4y ago
  Show stopper for me, but can I just say what a fantastic product and the article introducing it kept me hooked to the end!
  - anakic 4y ago
    I have to do my own marketing, so I'm trying to blog more often these days. Really glad to hear you enjoyed the writing!
- throwaway90650 4y ago
  Is there a technical blocker on macOS Excel side that prevents you from implementing it, or is it just a matter of priorities?
  - anakic 4y ago
    A bit of both. On the Windows side I can use VSTO or ExcelDNA to integrate with Excel, but neither is available on the Mac. One alternative I'd like to try is a web-based version which would use Blazor and the Monaco editor but I'm really not sure if that would be at all doable. I don't have the time to go there at the moment, but I'd love to try at some point.

OJFord 4y ago

Oh a plug-in, ha, for some reason I read the title and thought this was a 'just to show I can' type implementation of all those things actually in Excel, 'Doom in Excel' sort of thing. This seems far more useful!

whoisthemachine 4y ago
I also thought this was going to be an article about implementing a C# compiler in excel! This on the other hand seems like a very neat product.
- anakic 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, I probably should have made the title "...in Excel" instead of "...inside Excel". I wonder if more or fewer people would have clicked on it that way.
  - maxfurman 4y ago
    If we're being pedantic maybe "for Excel" would be clearer? But what do I know.
    - hoseja 4y ago
      That would be my choice too. Both "inside" and "in" imply "in the spreadsheet". "For", on the other hand I would understand as "for the Excel program".
    - anakic 4y ago
      I was considering "for" but I wanted to imply that the IDE is actually located inside Excel, rather than being a separate program.
      - Jorengarenar 4y ago
        "working inside"?
  - 4y ago

barrenko 4y ago

This is pretty mad.

denismurphy 4y ago

Hats off @anakic this is class! It would be a game-changer if Microsoft licensed QueryStorm built in to Excel. Let's hope the right people at Microsoft are paying attention to you.

anakic 4y ago
Thanks! Wouldn't mind that outcome one bit. It's hard to get exposure and adoption for a platform like this without some serious muscle backing it. I suspect Microsoft has its sights set on the cloud, though, but still, it would be amazing if they adopted QueryStorm.

cm2187 4y ago

Microsoft actually built that already, then they decided to kill it. It was called VSTA (not to be confused with VSTO). It shipped with one of the apps of Office 2007.

anakic 4y ago
At first I thought you were referring to VSTO, then I saw the "not to be confused with VSTO" part. I had no idea this ever existed. Thanks for mentioning it. I wonder why they decided to pull the plug back then.
- cm2187 4y ago
  I suspect it must have been part of "let's try to secure / lockdown office", "users writing codes is bad, they should only push buttons", and at the same time they tried to make it as hard as possible to use VBA (all sorts of warnings and things disabled by default, etc) I am also aware of a commercial product that offers a .net IDE to be embeded into your software, though I never tried it: https://www.alternetsoft.com/products/scripter https://www.alternetsoft.com/products/scripter
- kleiba 4y ago
  Funnily, QueryStorm uses VSTO behind the scenes: the IDE component is a VSTO addin.

samsquire 4y ago

This is absolutely awesome. The combination of a spreadsheet, database and data scripting runtime would be extremely powerful. This is where Airtable, nocodb and baserow are candidates. I worked at a company that used gridgain with Excel as a cluster to process models on lots of servers. I suspect there's a lot of low level Windows integration details about how to integrate with Excel. COM objects and DLLs. Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it. How you design software that is extensible? Atom was extensible and VS Code is less so. Why has nobody integrated the web browser with QT? So we can browse into a Qt application. So you can create desktop widgets and canvases with Qt from Javascript? That way you could ship desktop software and arbitrary integrations to software.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it. I feel it's because of inherent conflict of interests and priorities. A software product can provide services to the user, or provide services to other programs. It's rare to see one that does both, because the two goals seem often at odds. Say you're writing a software component for other programs to use. You probably have some specific programs in mind, some of which are end-user-facing. In this case, you may not want to spend resources on developing user-facing UI and features that make your product usable stand-alone - you'd likely end up competing with your own customers. Say you're writing user-facing software instead. You want to own the entire user experience. Mixing UI, user interaction and the "business problem"-solving code together lets you work faster. Also, you don't want to make it easy for anyone to integrate with the core of your software, because that would be inviting competitors to own the user experience while using your own backend, ruining all kinds of marketing shenanigans you'd rather play on your users. I don't like this, but I see there's a mix of both reasonable and greedy reasons why software isn't developed with integration in mind. The major exception here is when the platform on which the software runs encourages, insists on, or demands the software to allow for integration. Windows does that to an extent with COM / DCOM. Emacs does that by its nature. But it's only moving the problem one level up - e.g. Microsoft environment can't integrate well with Apple environment.
brendank310 4y ago

inglor 4y ago

I work on Excel at Microsoft and this is really cool. I’ll check it out and share it with the rest of the R&D.

anakic 4y ago
Thanks, that's great!! <3
keithalewis 4y ago
Please tell Satya to show the ancient C SDK a little love. I'd hate to see this disappear: https://github.com/xlladdins/xll#fp-data-type https://github.com/xlladdins/xll#fp-data-type
andysinclair 4y ago
Do you know if this item from the Microsoft 365 roadmap would stop Add-ins (xll files) like this from working? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=115485 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... I also have a vested interest as one of my software products is an xll Add-in. Any further details from Microsoft would be most welcome, thanks.
- anakic 4y ago
  No idea, haven't seen this until now. Hopefully they provide a mechanism for allowing legitimate addins to get around it. Perhaps using a code signing cert (which I do) or an EV certificate would be appropriate. Security has been a bit of nightmare with Excel addins. I've had to deal with false positives on and off again a bunch of times already. First it was windows smart screen, then antivirus vendors every so often. It's a slog...
  - tech234a 4y ago
    Typically you can go into the file properties and check the “Unblock” checkbox to remove what Microsoft calls the “Mark of the Web”.
- 4y ago

major505 4y ago

this is.... awesome.

major505 4y ago

Now I can use excel. I always sucked doing stuff in excell formulas. With this now I can just linq and spit the info I need.

viggity 4y ago
devs "hate" excel because you have to reference by col/row (C10 = tax rate, etc). But few devs know that you can name cells (and ranges and tables). Just to the left of the formula bar you'll see a textbox with the default name of the cell (C10). Just delete C10 and call it "tax_rate" and now you can reference "tax_rate" in all your formulas.
- major505 4y ago
  I did a lot of shit in excell using vb. Even spreadsheets connected to SAP using COM+ dlls. But still sucks having to do requests in VB.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Now sure how known this is, but Excel 365 for Business / Enterprise supports Office Scripts (under a "Automate" tab), where you can create scripts in TypeScript. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overvie... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/scripting-fundamentals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop...
- gompertz 4y ago
  I just started writing Typescript in Excel. It's really surprising this hasn't taken off more. It works very well, but is only available on Excel Web (not Desktop) application.

actionfromafar 4y ago

Find a way to connect this to Zapier and the Universe might open up a wormhole.

anton_ai 4y ago

Installed :)

samstave 4y ago

Beautiful. So can people upload their code snips to the appstore such that, say, a marketing data analytics person with no coding experience can pay to get 'buttons' to run queries that are relevant to their needs? like the salaries example, for example, I used to spend a shit-ton of time educating a CFO on AWS spends in excel. If I could have a code snip 'button' to use some AWS-CLI creds to pull results directly from AWS asa "CFO BUTTON" and set them up with an easy export to an XLS - and then let them build their own dash to their choice that would be cool. I havent looked at Cloudability in quite a while, (know the founder) -- but giving a CFO-type an excel button... Every CFO can navigate excel. so they get an invisible tool that empowers them, and relieves stress on the Ops team...

anakic 4y ago
Yep, that's the idea. You create a project that defines some custom functions, ribbon commands, context menus, shortcuts etc... and then publish it to a store. Then anyone who has the QueryStorm Runtime (and the url of the store you published to) can install it through the "Extensions" dialog. I haven't yet set up the ability to charge for packages but I plan on offering this. I first need a community of users, so didn't focus on charging yet. If you'd like some help setting up something like that AWS scenario, reach me via email: antonio [at] querystorm.com, I've done several such integrations already (Google analytics, Monday.com, TSheets, Google drive).

cobrabyte 4y ago

This is excellent. Great work!

T3RMINATED 4y ago

[dead]

gadders 4y ago

Good work, but this is depressing: "VBA is a bit (a lot) behind the times and Microsoft isn’t planning on upgrading it. Instead, they’re offering a sandboxed JavaScript environment called Office Scripts." Microsoft - Just swap VBA for Python ffs.

qiqitori 4y ago
There's a lot of people who only know VBA (in terms of programming languages), and there's a huge amount of VBA code in production out there. Microsoft won't make itself popular by replacing VBA for some silly technical reason, especially not because the syntax is perceived to look better. It's a bit like renaming the SUM function to ADD and expecting everyone to rewrite their formulas.

nycdotnet 4y ago

Looks awesome. One fundamental issue I always faced with Excel calculations of any kind (formulas or vba) is the lack of ability to source control cleanly (binary format plus data and code are intermingled). This weakness is the other side of the spreadsheet’s greatest strength which is low friction experimentation with data. Does this product attempt to do anything here?

anakic 4y ago
Thanks! You can version control the code you write with QueryStorm, to an extent. There are basically two kinds of apps you can build with this: extension apps (where you build general excel functionality) and workbook apps (where you automate a particular workbook). The code for extension apps is stored in a folder on your machine, and you can version control that easily. The code for workbook apps is stored inside workbooks. While there's no version control functionality in QueryStorm, it does let you export code from a workbook into a folder, as well as import code from a folder into a workbook project. There are context menu commands for this in the code explorer pane. This lets you decouple the code from the workbook. Basically, for version controlling code in a workbook, you'd have to export the code into a folder and version control it there. Exporting into a folder will clear everything from the folder except hidden stuff like the ".git" folder so your git repository will be safe. Not a perfect solution, but it can be done.
- whitemary 4y ago
  Can you also import it from the folder?
  - anakic 4y ago
    Yeah, you can import the folder back into the project and it will replace all of the existing files with the ones from the folder.
- cxr 4y ago
  Since XLSX etc. use Microsoft's Open Packaging Convention (a ZIP container consisting of mostly plain text), consider adding native support for unpacking and normalizing the payloads so they can be trivially diffed by existing source control systems.

ckluis 4y ago

I clicked on resellers & affiliates because I was curious about your terms. They are both empty.

anakic 4y ago
Yeah, didn't get around to populating those yet. One-man show, so things slip by... ComponentSource is currently the only reseller: https://www.componentsource.com/product/querystorm-plugin https://www.componentsource.com/product/querystorm-plugin Thanks for the heads up!
- ckluis 4y ago
  Let me know if you want to chat about sales/marketing linkedin.com/in/ckluis

gwbas1c 4y ago

I tried clicking on the animation to make it bigger, but the larger image doesn't load. I'm using the Brave browser.

layer8 4y ago
Same on FireFox.
- anakic 4y ago
  Yeah, I just checked and it fails on some gifs for me as well (but works on others for some reason). I'll leave it as is for now, best not fiddle with it while this post is trending.

mcdonje 4y ago

Really cool. I could see MS jumping on this because of their strong association with C#. That said, I think the ideal replacement for VB & VBA in most contexts is python. The reason is they're both high level languages with ease of learning as a selling point. Python has a massive userbase, and there is significant overlap of python and MS Office tools. Data analysts who have to deal with Excel & SQL Server are much more likely to know python than any other language outside of SQL. It seems like python has pretty much locked up the spaces that VB was designed for.

kab0b 4y ago
I thought I remember hearing like 4 or 5 years ago that MS was planning on replacing VBA with Python Support in Office apps. But I can't find anything to back that up, so maybe I just had a really wishful dream.
- mcdonje 4y ago
  They might have some involvement in python libraries or tooling to interact with excel files from python apps, but the default programming support within excel is still VBA. They did add a javascript API, but getting that up and running is a job geared more for a dev than a data analyst. What I think they should do is not just make a python API, but replace VBA with it, and expose it to end users where VBA is currently exposed. Python should be the language of macros and user defined functions.
  - raarts 4y ago
    I tried to find info on how to set that up a while ago, but found nothing. The Microsoft pages gave me the impression it only works for the web version. Akso I'm on MacOS - couldn't find any mention of that either.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    They should dust off Windows Scripting Host and use that as the nexus for Office app scripting.

orbit7 4y ago

Impressive, Excel would benefit having this built in

chinupbuttercup 4y ago

Would this work with Excel for the Mac as well or is primarily a Windows thing? Somehow, while good, I feel like Excel for Mac just isn't as good as Excel for Windows.

anakic 4y ago
Unfortunately, no. Excel for Mac doesn't support either of the two technologies QueryStorm uses to talk to Excel (namely VSTO and ExcelDNA). Might be possible to build something that would work across all plaforms using Blazor and the Monaco editor, but that would be another huge project.
- btown 4y ago
  I wish that someone would make a Wine-style compatibility library that would run a local websocket server that communicates with a lightweight Add-In using the new cross-platform JS APIs for Excel, and translates VSTO/COM calls into IPC messages that are processed and responded to. Then you could bring all the old VSTO tools into the modern world, running in a separate process from Excel. This is... rather daunting to even think about. Arguably Apple should sponsor the project as a way to bring the world of finance towards using Macs!

brushfoot 4y ago

This is excellent. I can see buying it for my business. We already use Excel extensively for the open file format; that it's local first; that it's just a file; the low ceremony of getting started; the multipurpose grid for code, data, and presentation; the ubiquity. The more low-code/no-code SaaS products I've tried, the more I value it. LC/NC SaaS generally is expensive and inflexible. Everybody knows Excel, it's dirt cheap, and it just works. It's part of a certain IT subculture to bash it, but I stopped laughing along. Excel is great at what it does. Love seeing clean solutions like this that give it even more muscle.

beached_whale 4y ago
I love how approachable it is. Domain experts in other fields are able to program in excel and codify their knowledge. While, not always great in terms of code quality, often it is bad, it still provides a great starting point in moving to something more resilient and safer in terms of data validation. There is a reason it is the worlds most poplar programming language
- redavni 4y ago
  "most poplar programming language" In your opineion.
  - indrora 4y ago
    Not just in one HN'ers opinion. The thing is: Excel is one part data store and one part programming interface. The programming interface just happens to be a part of the data store. This leads people who have been told they're not allowed to program to solve the problem with the best tool they can hold: Excel. I once got an email in my inbox that had the subject "Help: recommendations for machine to run Excel". The body described a person within a business unit who had a laptop, ca. 2018, with a then current I7, 32G of RAM, dual raid10 SSDs, and it had one job: Open, edit, and evaluate one 5+GB Excel workbook. This workbook took twenty minutes to open. It's so bad Microsoft actually gave some level of proper functional programming to Excel: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/04/microsoft_excel_lambda/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/04/microsoft_excel_lambd... What happens is this pattern where more applicable programming models are taken from business folk, who need a way to do some level of broad, tabular accounting usually. These individuals don't have Python, don't know Python, or web applications, etc. What they have is Excel. Excel lets you do something very easily that no other thing in existence lets you do: Real time (ish) calculations against very large sets of data. I can write one cell, `=AVERAGE($A9:$A99)` and get the running average for 90 rows in a table. Imagine the work that would go into doing that in a language like Python or Go, plus the scaffolding to make it work in a webapp. And so when a business unit says "we need a way to do X", inevitably someone says "there's no budget for that" and someone eventually finds their way to Excel. Then they build the thing in Excel and when someone realizes they have a monster on their hands someone inevitably says "this should be a webapp" at which point nobody has the funding to maintain that webapp plus its infrastructure, plus handling the implicit and explicit logic that comes along with the mixture of data, code, and everything else in an Excel spreadsheet.

replwoacause 4y ago

This is such an impressive feat of engineering. Excellent job. I have no doubt this will be a hit. It wouldn't surprise me if MSFT just decided to make you an offer for it.

nielsbosma 4y ago

Love it! Big fan of developer productivity tool like Linqpad.

RektBoy 4y ago

If the user can code in C#, why they need Excel? Exporting to Excel for other non-coder employees, sure why not. I don't understand the use-case, Excel is horrible tool for anything else than stupid, a few hundred rows data science.

eatsyourtacos 4y ago
You must not work with any kind of real world data if you think Excel is a horrible tool. Pulling in 1000000000 rows of data you know absolutely nothing about to throw into your ML model and have it spit out some questionable result doesn't mean you actually work with real world data. >a few hundred rows data science. People that work with a few hundred rows are called "almost every office employee ever" and not data scientists. And you are naïve as hell if don't realize how powerful excel is for every random ass thing that happens in the real world.

ChicagoDave 4y ago

Linq in Excel is very interesting.

jbb_hn 4y ago

Wow. As someone that has written a fair amount of VBA in the past, this is a game changer. Impressive feat of integration and I hope you're rewarded for all your efforts. Clearly a passion project!

kinggencha 4y ago

Animations embedded within text are distracting and make the reading experience worse

anakic 4y ago
I like that a gifs shows so much in very little space, but I take your point about it being distracting. Regular mp4 videos you can play/pause explicitly might be a better option for the future.

charles_f 4y ago

Looks awesome, and my favorite thing is this: > $379 License + 1yr support Cheers to you for not collecting a recurring fee for a desktop app!

capableweb 4y ago
The license is for 1 year of latest versions of the application, after that you'll stop receiving updates. This is pretty common for desktop applications, compared to SaaS.
- charles_f 4y ago
  It's becoming less and less common, even for desktop applications - which is why I thought this warranted some congratulations

drorco 4y ago

This looks great! In my previous company, we somehow ended up building a whole ERP around Google Sheets. Google Sheets is a very powerful tool, but the JavaScript definitely felt clunky and outdated. A solid C# foundation for building on top of excel could probably be very useful for some companies. I do wonder though how you can nail down a target audience for this kind of tool, seems like you'd need a special kind of tinkerer and I'm not sure how many like that are out there. In my other company, which was a small company, the ones who headed it were essentially engineers that transitioned to executive positions. I doubt there are many like that out there.

ozim 4y ago

Don't show it to my boss, please. It is super cool and would love to play around with it - just not at work :)

rukuu001 4y ago

I remember you back when it was just an SQL plug-in for Excel :) Congrats on building this and sticking with it so long. It’s awesome!

813919 4y ago

This is incredible. I work in industrial automation and I often have to manage / make edits to "point assignment charts" which are essentially Excel Workbooks with 100+ Worksheets, each containing ~10-100 rows of formatted data which define various parameters each real world "point" should have in order to communicate with RTUs / various SCADA nodes. Sometimes the feedback involves making a minor tweak on every Worksheet. Sure you can muck around with VBA (which is a horrible language and experience), but I often just do it manually to get it over with instead (click click click... very tedious). C# is my go-to "business logic" language as a developer, and this looks so well integrated, really excited to use it.

anakic 4y ago
Would love to know how you get on with it. If you'd care to share, please to let me know.
- 813919 4y ago
  Sure! I'll make a reminder to follow up a week from now on my UX. Thanks :)
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Sometimes the feedback involves making a minor tweak on every Worksheet." Could be a good task for PowerShell and the ImportExcel module[1]. (PowerShell also being a .NET language and written in C#; it has convenient access to COM control of Excel if you can't import the spreadsheet and export an updated version; through $xl = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application ) [1] https://github.com/dfinke/ImportExcel https://github.com/dfinke/ImportExcel
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
You have inherited a crappy database. Export it via ODBC and use more powerful tools.
- 813919 4y ago
  No not really, it's many projects with many documents, shared among many contractors. You use Excel Workbooks when you work in fields like this. We have it formatted to be pretty too, so we can just publish to PDF via Adobe Acrobat when it's time to send in submittals.

charlieflowers 4y ago

Looks great, but I ran into an issue I'm hoping you can help with. I copy/pasted the very first example from the blog and it doesn't compile. I also have been unable to find the documentation necessary to get past the problem. It's the example that reads the files in a dir and makes an Excel table, and it fails on line 16, which reads `(excel.Selection as Range).WriteTable(files, "myNewTable");`. The error is `Argument 2: cannot convert from 'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<<anonymous type: string File, long Size>>' to 'QueryStorm.Data.ITabular' | ` I can't find docs for WriteTable() [even after finding those gitlab repos that contain QueryStorm docs]. I think anyone trying to run with this, will need access to docs on the API.

anakic 4y ago
Thanks for trying it and replying back here. It looks like I was using a pre-release version of QueryStorm while I was writing the blog post. I just released that version so if you restart Excel you should get an "Update available" button in the QueryStorm ribbon in Excel. Could you update and post back if that fixed the problem? Another way of "fixing" it would be to replace the following line: (excel.Selection as Range).WriteTable(files, "myNewTable"); with this line: Write(files, "myNewTable"); The Write method is available globally (it's not a method that belongs to a class). This is a trick specific to C# scripts (would be illegal in regular C#). The documentation does lack detail in some areas, which I basically cover by answering questions via email. I do need to invest time every so often to update and extend it.
- charlieflowers 4y ago
  The update fixed it. Thanks! Look forward to giving it a spin.

waldrews 4y ago

Spectacular. Stats PhD here, I've needed this for years for practical projects in different data science roles. I'd love to talk to you about adding statistics/forecasting capabilities, maybe by exposing some existing libraries with syntactic sugar.

anakic 4y ago
Would love to! There's a library called Math.NET that I wanted to look into, but never got around to it (plus, I forgot 99% of the math I learned in college so wouldn't know how to use it). Can you get in touch via email: antonio [at] querystorm.com?

anigbrowl 4y ago

A fine example of what caffeine has done to our great nation's youth. What could have been an obscure command-line interface enjoying a modest but dignified place in the field of traditional operating systems is instead condemned to the gridded prison of automated balance sheets under the beady eyes of our financial overlords. Jokes aside, this is an amazing achievement, the more so for being realized by a single person working away patiently for years - truly inspiring. And it brought out a wave of nostalgia for a former life where I made a living building bespoke tools in the (pre-VBA) Excel macro language. All that and solid business sense too! I hope companies shower Antonio with money, and that Microsoft either leaves him alone or rewards him with gold and the autonomy to lead technical product development for the long term. It's rare to see such a singular combination of vision and execution, doubly so in a very mature product space belonging to a global megacorporation.

emrah 4y ago

"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" is a very good sign :)

anakic 4y ago
Too bad about 8h of downtime in the middle of it trending, but yeah, can't complain too much about it:)

slenk 4y ago

Aww man, you ran out of bandwidth. May I suggest putting your server behind Cloudflare to help with that? I would offer storage if you want. I have so much extra linode bandwidth

bandyaboot 4y ago

This sounds really impressive.

quickthrower2 4y ago

HN’s loving DDOS has pulled this offline. Any mirrors?

anakic 4y ago
Back online now

mandeepj 4y ago

"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later." HN kiss of death. Hopefully, you'd be back soon.

anakic 4y ago
Yeah:) Of course it happens while I'm asleep. Serves me right for loading the post with so many gifs... Back online now.

kristianp 4y ago

https://archive.is/1w42O https://archive.is/1w42O

anakic 4y ago
Oh man, limit happened while I was asleep. Thanks for the stopgap measure. Just got the bandwith limit removed with my hosting provider.

ivan_burazin 4y ago

This is just positivity insane :)

anakic 4y ago
Fala, Ivane:)

fazzbuilder 4y ago

I have used QueryStorm since May 2016 back then ThingieQuery. My head exploded from the first moment I saw it considering everything that it integrates and embeds within Excel since for a long time I have resorted to automating routines with ado and vba. Querystorm is more than just a SQL IDE built right into the book and honestly this is the best solution in this environment that every data analyst, self-service developer or business user should give it a try.

thunkshift1 4y ago

You have unlocked the power(utility?) of excel for sooo many people! Msft should buy this from you