I work on Excel at Microsoft and this is really cool. I’ll check it out and share it with the rest of the R&D.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
I also have a vested interest as one of my software products is an xll Add-in. Any further details from Microsoft would be most welcome, thanks.
Which in turn leads me to think there should be a way to create a virtual Range object in VBA that isn't really in a sheet (or a VirtualRange object that is similar enough to Range to make it work for most purposes). If one were to refactor Range entirely (not suggesting that), it seems like the issue is that the Range object actually encapsulates two different data representations into one jumbled up object: (1) cells in a worksheet with properties such as style, fill, value, etc. and (2) a traversable quasi-array data type with useful methods such as offset, rows, columns, etc. Those two things often line up, but not always.
Anyway, I probably spend too much time thinking about Excel :-) </rant>
In Excel working hard to make addons possible and trying to foster an ecosystem of users sharing expertise is a focus as well as community building and smbs.
Taking a cool community project and doing it ourselves would shooting our selves in the foot.
More than once I didn’t do things or work in features for that reason.
Again not because Microsoft is your friend but because it’s in our business interest.
I don’t speak for Microsoft or Excel and am just a developer/hacker ;)
(not that I'm arguing for trust that would, as you say, be misplaced, but if my feeling is correct then the Excel org's englightened self interest can diverge from the mothership's self interest more than other divisions can, which makes the calculations as to what your management is likely to decide notably different)
Apps (where Office belongs), DevDiv (VS, .NET and such), WinDev (Windows, C, C++).
All of them used to compete quite a lot among themselves.
No idea how it looks like nowadays with all the business units, but I get a feeling that WinDev vs DevDiv is still a thing.
He declined several approaches from ex-Borland people working at Microsoft, before reaching that point.
https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...