

Show HN: Excel 2013 - doppenhe

Not exactly a side project but my work for the last 2.5 years. As an avid HN lurker would love to hear feedback.<p>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)<p>To download: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en
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Cyrix
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).

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

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doppenhe
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)

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codeonfire
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.

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doppenhe
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).

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

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

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dougbarrett
Is there going to be a release for OS X?

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mikeyouse
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.

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doppenhe
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.

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mikeyouse
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).

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doppenhe
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.

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tonyjwang
Flash fill looks sick.

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doppenhe
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 :)

