vba

You just reminded me I tried to make an office addin a few years back and distribute it on the office store. Terrible experience trying to get Microsoft’s admin/business center (whatever it is/was called) to verify I was actually a real human/owner of the domain as a sole proprietor. Terrible.

I’m not Michael - presuming you are referring to Michael the PM. I was a dev. I’ll add you on LinkedIn.

Great to here you praise auth. I almost forgot getting auth ‘right’ inside Excel was a real time burglar.

An aside - I wanted the username xl but someone registered it the day before (the day before!) me on hn.

I don’t unfortunately. Given the more technical nature of the feature I’m inclined to agree Microsoft should make a bountiful supply of working examples.

Thanks for your kind words. Did you ever use streaming function to update your analytics periodically or when new data become available?

Oh this must be Felix! I saw and played with xlwings many years ago and was impressed :)

Agreed with the friction around getting started. I would like to see it reduced. It’s cool to see you using them to wrap Python functions - I have done something similar before myself, and still need to get around to shimming Haskell into excel at some point.

Another thing I don’t like is how JavaScript Custom Function cell formulas have a horrible string after the _xldudf marker, which becomes noticeable if your workbook doesn’t/can’t load the custom functions addin (or you unload the addin)

Thanks for your comment

This was a nice surprise to see today as an Ex-Excel developer who worked on trying to bring Python to Excel (and, I guess, failing ;)).

7+ years ago I had the option of leaving the Excel team. My then boss’s boss knew I had an interest in bringing Python to Excel and offered me a chance to tackle it if I chose to stay. What was meant to be a 6 month project turned into a ~3 year project, the Python part faded away and we ended up enabling JavaScript Custom Functions in Excel instead.

For Python we were also running ‘in the cloud’ (AzureML v1), although there was some back-and-forth on if we should run locally. I think what made the Python part disappear was our partner AzureML team re-orged, re-released, re-hired, we lost a PM and our work caught the attention of another partner team who realised they could use our code to execute their JavaScript out-of-process. And so I spent a lot of time ensuring that feature was successfully shipped at, I guess, the detriment of Python.

I had a lot of help from some strong engineers and learnt a lot. The core of the work was modifying the calculation engine of Excel to allow functions to compute asynchronously, allowing the user to continue working on other parts of their spreadsheet while the remote endpoint (be it JavaScript, Python or something else) was computing. Previously the spreadsheet would lock up while calculations were running, and that wouldn’t be cool for long-running unbounded calculations. Have to wonder if any of the stuff we built made it into this new feature.

Super great to see this and look forward to trying it out.

Recalc or die

Air quality is something I've been thinking about more and more. I'm currently mostly in Bangkok and now I check the air quality (aqair) before I exercise outdoors, and often end up skipping. Though I haven't looked into it deeply, I'd love to see some trustworthy conclusions about how I'm affecting my future health by living in Bangkok. I've really come to miss the Pacific Northwest partly because of the clean air (except, of course, during the wildfire seasons)

I'm building a house in Bangkok and up in Chiang Mai of all places (see the company is from there) and was thinking of adding some air quality sensors there so will definitely check airgradient's out.

If I may ask Achim, do you manufacture in Thailand? What kind of scale you at? No promises, but I have access to some decent sized factories and given your mission, there might be something we can help with.

Recall Christmas Day eating some sweets (which I didn’t like) and playing this (which I did like). I got this for my 6th (?) Christmas. Most memorable things for me were demonstration of gears (using mammoths) and the guy who would pop up if you went AFK.

Also dorling kindersly’s eyewitness soundtrack deserves a special mention.

Yup combined Christmas and birthday presents and additionally forfeit any money I received from relatives back in the year 2000. Had to fight for it and made to feel guilty on how much it cost.

Didn’t become a robotics engineer.