[dba-Tech] Supercharge your excel spreadsheet

Hi Shamil:

You realize that much of what goes into Excel is crap code, pushed in by
some office clerk that has never programmed anything before, so adding yet
another layer is hardly going to ruin the spreadsheet. It is hard to spoil a
bad egg they say. ;-)

If there is a better method for extending Excel's capability and you know
how then maybe you should explore it. Consider your competition. This
company, Datanitro with little more than a hack or two is on course to make
a fortune with their product. Like I said before; Mixing, matching and
mashups is the new tech future.

Do I like that type of coding? No, but there is so much of it done these
days and no one seems to care as long as it looks good. Few wants to pay for
someone or pay for the time to do it right. 

Aside: A question I have always wondered about. Why can the latest Ubuntu OS
load and run on a CD, about 200K in size and an OS like Window8 takes 10GB
of hard drive space. Can I assume that because it is 50 times the size
Windows has significantly more features? You don't have to answer that as I
am sure no one really could...it is just one of those mysteries we will just
have to accept.

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Salakhetdinov
Shamil
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 10:05 PM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Supercharge your excel spreadsheet

 Hi Jim --

<<<
I smell another business opportunity. :-)
>>>
As Stuart I'm rather skeptical about this "supercharge approach". I mean:
AFAIU they use DLL(s) or COM Add-in to communicate with Python interpreter -
that promise to be rather slow at runtime.

To "supercharge (excel/libra-calc) worksheets" I'd use something like
OpenXML SDK with Python web services providing absent in MS Excel/libra-calc
financial (modeling) packages functionality...

IMO the approach they propose is yet another potential source of very
crappy, slow, having high support costs custom apps we've got so much with
VB6 and VBA in 90-ies and 00-ies...

I can be wrong.

Thank you.

-- Shamil