Microsoft Adds Support For JavaScript Functions in Excel (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the Build 2018 developer conference that's taking place these days in Seattle, USA, Microsoft announced support for custom JavaScript functions in Excel. What this means is that Excel users will be able to use JavaScript code to create a custom Excel formula that will appear in Excel's default formula database. Users will then be able to insert and call these formulas from within Excel spreadsheets, but have a JavaScript interpreter compute the spreadsheet data instead of Excel's native engine. "Office developers have been wanting to write JavaScript custom functions for many reasons," Microsoft says, "such as: (1) Calculate math operations, like whether a number is prime. (2) Bring information from the web, like a bank account balance. (3) Stream live data, like a stock price."

Comments

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[bobstreo]

The worst?

  With the tight security model Microsoft (and intel) always holds, combined with the track record of Javascript, they sky is the limit!

This will be used for mining

[xack]

One of the first “apps” for this will be yet another cryptocurrency miner that will be spread around an organization’s spreadsheets.

Re:Yes

[jellomizer]

Which is at least an Open Standard Programming language. Which works on different OS's and hardware architecture. And designed to run relatively safely on your PC.
VB is a hold over the Bad Old days of Microsoft. Where to get the feature you needed the entire ecosystem. Even the long time Office for the Mac, didn't didn't support VBscript (or at least not completely)

The biggest issue I have, is people using Excel and Access as their programming environment, to try to bypass us egotistical developers and get a program running fast. Only to have it break a year down the line and get those egotistical developers digging in poorly written and designed system to make heads or tail on what went wrong.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Oswald McWeany]

While Dante's inferno depicts several circles of Hell with the Devil in the center/bottom circle stuck in the floor being tortured for eternity - that's really not even the limit, there's another less well-known circle of Hell smack in the center: the Devil's colon. That is where this will go. That said, it's better than VBA.

It's barely better than VBA. JavaScript is (in the 21st Century) the equivalent of VBA in the 90's. Quick, crude, and unstructured; it's the "rabble" of languages.