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Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

With the coupon code in this thread, I was willing to go in on it, because it's comparable to what I pay for SSMS Tools. It's really really handy to be able to query an Excel table; a raw query window in SSMS is just about my favorite tool, but you can't beat being able to just get your hands right on the data like in Excel.

Ideally though? I would really like to have a one-time purchase option. I buy this for myself, though I work in a company, because this is a tool I particularly find useful. In a year it's going to just stop working, and I won't remember why, because I won't remember paying a license for it. Then I'll have to look up the email and do all the nonsense to figure out what my login is and buy it again. And that just sucks. I've dropped a lot of services because I just don't need them enough for that. But I'm hoping this works into my flow well enough.

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Thanks for your purchase!:) I'm really glad you like it.

One thing to note - since the db engine is running in the same process as Excel it can interact with it. There are some nice things it can do because of this, for instance, SQL-based conditional formatting (e.g. there's a SetFontColor function), calling VBA functions from SQL and a bunch more.

There are also some other quite cool functions, e.g. replacex and regex_split, levdist, eval and others. The QuickQueries dialog has some built-in queries to check out if you're interested in what these can do.

As for permanent licenses, I understand the concern. If I do end up going offering permanent licenses for professional licenses, I'll either upgrade the existing licenses or offer a paid upgrade to the permanent license to cover any price difference.

I'll be honest, I didn't read the full feature list. I looked at some of the quick queries and was really happy to see some of them.

Yeah, the amount of intellectual violence I'll be able to perpetrate against my data is just staggering. Regex in Excel has always be a bit of a slog, but to do it in SQL in Excel? Gosh. That's almost worth the price of adminssion right there.

(Ever try to conditionally refactor a screwy OPC itempath based on an arbitrary spec and bad naming conventions in a cobbled together dump from an overworked customer engineer? Swiss army chainsaws are the only elegant solution there.)

Exactly, you can really go to town on your data, get nasty with it:)

I love regex myself, I feel like a ninja using them:) The replacex function was one of the first ones I implemented. Regex_split is the latest one and I love it (the single post on the QueryStorm blog is about that one).

If you're .NET-savvy, check out the "eval" function, you can implement a function as a C#-like lambda expression.

I did a poor job explaining what the plugin can do, QuickQueries is a step in that direction, but I only prepared a few. Plus they need short videos or at least blog posts to go along with them.

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