Glad to see F# vs. C#. I prefer F# and it doesn't get as much play as C#.<p>But, being more of a Lisper, I've already subscribed to Acceλerate for Microsoft 365[1]. It's basically a full scheme available in Excel with VSA (Visual Scheme for Applications - nice play on VBA to dupe the unaware ;) ). It has a full REPL and an editor and also creates UDFs. It is Excel's new Lambda on steroids.<p>I'll have to try Sharp Cells. I've played with J[2] and some Excel tie-in scripts, but it is not integrated as nicely as Sharp Cells or Acceλerate.<p>[1] <a href="https://apexdatasolutions.com/home" rel="nofollow">https://apexdatasolutions.com/home</a><p>[2] <a href="https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Scripts/OLEExcel" rel="nofollow">https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Scripts/OLEExcel</a>
I've done some VBA for work. If I build an Excel file with SharpCells and send them to someone who doesn't have it. What happens when they open it? From what I understand, .NET is pretty easy to decompile. Is it possible to make a SharpCells F# to VBA translation before saving?
We use F# and Excel as our main tools. This seems like a product made in heaven.<p>But this would never fly for us. The pricing model could not be sold to management.<p>What would work is if it was something like $5k for a year of updates. We're on 365 so office's constant updates would force us to upgrade every year. But management would not feel like they're renting something they would rather own.
Really cool - the stuff they are doing with the Excel API to inspect editing modes is super interesting: <a href="https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/blog/monitoring-edit-mode" rel="nofollow">https://www.sharpcells.com/docs/blog/monitoring-edit-mode</a><p>I work with data warehouses, but I'm really jealous of the way our Finance team uses some abysmal plugin to directly query our GL from inside Excel - building something like that the can make the contents of a modern data warehouse available to Excel users has always been a holy grail for me.<p>My hunch is that exposing free-form SQL in Excel doesn't work, but something more like structured metrics (something roughly like dbt metrics) could potentially work? And tooling like this is probably what I'd want to prototype with.
I'm always happy to see F# get a mention, but using it inside Excel seems funny when you could just use it against a raw CSV file or whatever for data analysis/data manipulation.
An interesting F# blog that was found for me: <a href="https://www.planetgeek.ch/" rel="nofollow">https://www.planetgeek.ch/</a>
Very cool, but...<p>Limiting (let alone this severely) a number of functions a developer can introduce and locking them in having to pay recurrently just to overcome this limitation and keep their code working is insane. I believe this dooms the product to be extremely unpopular. This way people probably won't even invest time in giving it a try.<p>Real-Time Data Sources sound like a thing which can be a premium feature. Unlimited UDFs and Unlimited Commands don't.