Show HN: Excel 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Excel 2013

20 pointsdoppenhe17 comments

Not exactly a side project but my work for the last 2.5 years. As an avid HN lurker would love to hear feedback.

Background: I am a PM on the Excel team in charge of the advanced data analysis tools (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/Products/OfficePreview.aspx)

To download: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

View on HN

We really want VBA to use all cores of the CPU rather than just one.

VBA is currenly simply too slow, NOT able to use more than 25% of CPU capacity (3 out of 4 cores are idle when VBA is running).

I see that Excel still doesn't have any macro programming options except VBA. Where is support for C# (at least) programming of macros?

C# is absolutely supported through the COM interface. Although the built in IDE can only do VBA there is a full library that can be used with C# (how most add-ins are built)

Right, you can automate Excel in C# from outside of Excel or make an add-in, but you can't store code inside an Excel document or edit it from within Excel, or assign a worksheet control handler to directly execute C# code, etc.

thats right, but now you can do all that with JS/Html5. All in all I feel your pain though since i fall into this limitation myself (not a huge VBA fan).

Thanks for the preview! I don't understand if this is a web app or desktop app.

the apps will stream to your desktop but are desktop apps. O365 is also available which is the web apps.

Is there going to be a release for OS X?

As a follow-on question from someone who was forcefully converted from Win7 to OSX at a new job;

Is the release for OSX going to be productivity-crippling due to bugs (status bar disappears at random, etc.), frequent crashes (usually with powerpoint involvement), and haphazardly changed shortcut keys?

Love your Excel-for-Windows work though.

again I cannot comment on the OSX release because I actually don't know. If your having stability issues make sure to send those crash reports we actually have some pretty cool collection and analysis tools for crashes that lets us work on the reliability of the product.

No worries, it was mostly tongue-and-cheek anyways. I went from being a maestro at the keyboard to hunting and pecking with the switchover to the OSX version. This is nobody's fault but my own.

I'm very curious to try the Windows version though, what are some of the bigger changes? (Aside from the better pivot tables, better sharing, and smart-fill on the product page).

For Excel in particular the list is actually really long. The big ones are flash fill (pattern recognizition for data cleansing), quick analysis (live preview of different analysis elements with your data), side by side Excel sheets, Chart animations, automatic PivotTable recommendations, automatic Chart recommendations, Data model (Powerpivot - in memory data analysis engine that allows creating relationships between data sources -db style), among 100 more.

the windows and OSX releases are not usually tied together and are actually developed by different teams. I do not have any info on their vnext release sadly.

Yes: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/faq

They somewhat claim that it will be released alongside the Windows release.

Unless I'm wrong, they are talking about Office 365 which is their web app version of Office.

I'm thinking that by the time the new version of Office is released, Google will make their website more tablet friendly, or beef up Google Drive for tablets to be more than just a document viewer.

Flash fill looks sick.

its really is pretty awesome, straight from Microsoft Research. I have been using it for the last couple of months and I don't think I could live without it at this point :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com