Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft has created a new set of interfaces for Office 2013, based on HTML5 and JavaScript, that will allow services to be surfaced within Office applications... the same APIs will be made available to enterprises and third-party developers to create their own add-ons for Exchange, SharePoint, and the Office client applications.

> Microsoft is not abandoning Visual Basic for Applications; the VBA engine is still fully supported within Office 2013. But it’s clear that Microsoft wants to push office toward the same development frameworks that it is using for the Metro environment in Windows 8.

VBA macros getting replaced by JavaScript+HTML (or probably XAML)? That's potentially a game-changer right there. I have at least half-a-dozen data sources available online that I would love to get into Excel, but VBA/Excel isn't a good language for consuming data sources. Being able to build a web client into Excel would make my life drastically better.

I came here to post the same quote, but my interest is the reverse: think of all the interesting data currently stuck in Word and Excel that could be interfacing with web services!

The ability to sell subscriptions to Word plugins written on the web stack is going to power at least a few successful new businesses.

You can script Excel with Python using IronSpread, you can get it from http://www.ironspread.com. It's free and it's super easy to import/export data.

Perl and Win32::OLE works pretty well, too, especially if you like archaeology.

Their FAQ says it's a free beta of a paid product and to contact them if you're interested in using it commercially, so it probably won't be free for too much longer.

A free non-commercial version will remain available, fear not!

Could be part of the reason for Google's recent revamp of Google Apps Script: http://www.google.com/script/start/. Competition is good for the user.

I've worked at two companies where the accounting departments depended on in-house apps written in VBA. This shift may be exciting from some developers' perspectives, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a stumbling block for migration forward.

one of the main goals for the Office applications is so that you can create your own visualizations. Don't like any of the charts in powerpoint? create your own.

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