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Spreadsheet is a form of programming, so you can build anything there.
by airstrike 1y ago
Spreadsheet is a form of programming, so you can build anything there.
- cluckindan 1y agoLet’s see an HTTP server in an Excel sheet.
- airstrike 1y agoThat's a disingenuous take. You could write one, but it won't be allowed to connect to anything other than itself because Excel doesn't give it the network stack or IO it needs. Unless you use VBA, of course. See https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html
- shortstuffsushi 1y agoMaybe just me but seeing side by side "spreadsheets are all you need" and ".ai" seem to be somewhat uh... competing claims.
- airstrike 1y agoIt's a play on "Attention is all you need", the seminal AI paper. The author of that website implemented GPT-2 inference on Excel
- oblio 1y agoFairly sure Excel can get access to the entire .NET runtime. Plus, someone made a MOV only compiler, soon...
- homarp 1y agohttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/excel/calling-user-defined-functions-from-dlls https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/ex... Calling user-defined functions (UDFs) from a worksheet is as simple as calling built-in functions: You enter the function via a cell formula.
- Someone 1y agoI didn’t check their claim, but https://github.com/michaelneu/webxcel https://github.com/michaelneu/webxcel: “Webxcel creates a full-fledged RESTful web backend from your Microsoft Excel workbooks. It is written in 100% plain Visual Basic macros and comes with a lot of handy tools to help you build the next big thing.”
- cluckindan 1y agoHa! Sure beats the pure bash HTTP server. ;-)
- kibibu 1y agoNot a common opinion, but one I happen to share.
- layer8 1y agoSpreadsheets traditionally don’t support iteration (loops) or recursion. In Excel you had to go the VBA route for actual programming.
- airstrike 1y agoIn my hands they do
- johnisgood 1y agoThat is the spirit.
- accrual 1y agoIn the distant future: $ ./myapp.xlsx --port 8080 My App listening on port 8080 Loaded 1337 rows
- mryall 1y agoThe future is now with Microsoft Excel Web Services, which is part of SharePoint. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/excel-services-overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-dev...
- aruggirello 1y agoIn other hands, I have seen Excel spreadsheet hundred-products pricelists become a freaking tangle of merged cells, multiple rows for products, spelling mistakes, multiple spaces everywhere, and price cells hand-formatted. And I had to export the contents to machine readable .csv...
- accrual 1y agoThat sounds like a nightmare to untangle. On the other hand, it would be very satisfying to go from the original pricelists to a new, cleaned format!