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Comment by jereees | Hacker News Reader

A much better title: Eve Online strategy game announces JavaScript API to export user data.

The current title is misleading and clickbaity. There’s no Excel features inside the game, heck it’s not even a CSV API.

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What makes Excel's Javascript API Excel specific is their schema for providing type information with the data. Such as:

  const myDate = {
    type: Excel.CellValueType.formattedNumber,
    basicValue: 32889.0,
    numberFormat: "m/d/yyyy"
  };

That's more Excel focused than a CSV export would be. I don't see any specifics about the API implementation but they may be using this in the provided JSON data. Maybe those average ISK prices for commodities are provided with more decimal digits, but with formatting to display two digits, etc.

Excel add-ins and data types: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/ignite-2021-e...

EVE Online and Data Type APIs: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/data-types...

At 2:06:29 In the video https://youtu.be/ri6eTeCBUww?t=7586 they mention "With Microsoft we're building an extension that will allow players to log in and pull data directly into Excel"

Or into any other app that can accept data in the JSON format. The title of the article is a disingenuous jab. Exporting fine-grained data from a game that you can use for your own statistics, not locked into a single-purpose application with restricted abilities is powerful. Use Excel or build your own analytics, it's up to you.

Seems like something they can already do with Odata v4. You can provide excel (and powerbi) compatible json payload.

Eve already has APIs if you want to build tools that interface with the game. They literally did announce exporting directly to Excel.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/fanfest-is-here

> We’re leaning into the phrase ‘Spreadsheets in Space’ by partnering with Microsoft on a project revolving around democratization of data in EVE Online. Soon we’ll even be releasing an all-new extension that feeds data from EVE directly into Excel without any technical experience needed

If it's clickbaity, it's because CCP intended it to be.

There is a extensive JSON API available here [1], which I'm assuming this Excel API will make use of. And we already have this functionality in Google Sheets, so it's not exactly something new. It will be good to see more use of the API though, and interesting to see if they maintain this in the years to come. Perhaps them making a Excel extension will cause them to spend some time fixing all the things that have been broken with the API for a long time [2].

[1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/ [2] https://github.com/esi/esi-issues/issues

Yes, but "Eve is a spreadsheet MMO" is a meme, so this title is more creative and funny to those that know the meme, driving them to the article.

It's not clickbaity or misleading at all, though. Eve has an official partnership with Microsoft to make an Excel integration, and the fans literally cheered it during the fanfest. I don't understand what's clickbaity or misleading in the slightest.

I didn't say it was? I think the meme is hilarious, I love Eve and have played it since childhood.

I was just explaining why the title would be more attractive to anyone who follows Eve.

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