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

What could possibly go wrong?

[khandom08]

....

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!

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.

Yes

[cascadingstylesheet]

The only thing better than VB in a spreadsheet is JavaScript. This is awesome.

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:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge group of computer-using professionals that live and breathe Excel.

They are not programmers. But they do have script-kiddie level of competence, which they use for making Excel formulas and macros.

These people are in love with Excel, and when they submit requirements for actual software development, they adamantly insist that the software accept Excel documents as input, and that everything the program does be controlled by Excel.

This creates terrible inefficiency, gobbles up memory, slows the system down, injects an endless stream of bugs and support issues, and lets utterly unqualified people inject code into complex systems with little-to-no insight as to what-all is going to break because of it. But if you try to convince them to allow you to implement some of that logic in a proper coding language, they flatly refuse.

So, of all the programming languages that are common in the industry, which one is most likely to be one that this class of user has encountered, tampered with, and prefers?

Of course javascript. One of the Internet's oldest mistakes, and one of the worlds most sloppy and dangerous tools, will be put into the hands of non-programmer power-users to use right in the center of complex mission-critical systems that directly impact things like....oh I dunno....large sums of money moving around.

The world is run by the wrong people.

Re:Yes

[Opportunist]

By turning it off.

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.

No, not JavaScript!

[null etc.]

Good God, of all languages, why JavaScript? JavaScript is a terrible programming language! And its floating point math is bonkers, have you ever tried doing 0.1 * 0.2 in JavaScript, the answer is 0.020000000000000004! Can you imagine how main spreadsheet errors this will cause?

And JavaScript doesn't even have type safety! If Microsoft were smart, they would use a compiled programming language, like C, that you'd have to compile using a command-line compiler with a GPG-Key that you could inspect to avoid government MITM attacks! Now the government can get your tax spreadsheet information!

And, JavaScript is terrible because a lot of popular JavaScript frameworks have their own package managers! Can you imagine developers BLINDLY TRUSTING whatever package and whatever dependencies it has? Every developer should be forced to only use the OS package manager to install JavaScript libraries!

And, JavaScript is terrible because hundreds of programmers release hundreds of new packages every day, and they grow old and stale and now the JavaScript package ecosystem is older and staler and more crowded than the iOS app store ecosystem!

And, JavaScript is terrible because anyone can just pick it up and start playing with it, and they can write a web server in 15 minutes without even knowing about tail recursion or Monte Carlo cyclomatic complexity reduction! Script kiddies will start taking our jobs, and they don't even have to know how to covert an AST optimization into a stack heap implementation!

I hope that Microsoft realizes the error of their ways, and instead implement something like LISP as the programming language.

Re:No, not JavaScript!

[jaa101]

have you ever tried doing 0.1 * 0.2 in JavaScript, the answer is 0.020000000000000004! Can you imagine how main spreadsheet errors this will cause?

You appear to be ignorant of the way floating point numbers work. This is not a feature of JavaScript, but of the CPU in your computer. Try entering "=0.1*0.2" in an Excel cell and then turn up the format to 20 digits of precision. I'm not saying that JavaScript is good, but using this as your first example of how bad it is doesn't help your credibility.

When will they learn?

[zarmanto]

Microsoft has added various scripting languages to their Office products over the years... and each and every one has been abused by bad actors at some point, forcing Microsoft to cripple and/or remove the capability. What on earth could possibly make Microsoft think that adding JavaScript to Office documents will be any different? Particularly since it has already been abused in a myriad of ways within web browsers??

As the old saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results."

Re:This is very very welcome...but...

[jandrese]

Which Excel features are missing from Openoffice Calc that are a showstopper for you?

Re:This is very very welcome...but...

[guruevi]

You must never have heard of SQL, Python, R, ...

Try opening an Excel sheet with 15,000 lines and applying a filter... (I just got one of those in my Inbox - 2MB Excel sheet, takes 2 minutes to re-render any changes on an 8-core i7 (Excel: using 16 threads... 4%)