Add User Defined function support to the Apps for Office Excel APIs
Add User Defined function support to the Apps for Office Excel APIs so that users can enter formulas in excel. User Defined Functions are one of the most powerful features of Excel (and some competitor spreadsheets products now available in the web). They are critical for us to make our Apps for Office product as powerful as our legacy on premise product.
Darryl
shared this idea
Darryl, thanks for your feedback! We are at the early stages of design and prototyping exercise for this feature. We look forward to sharing the details as soon as we can.
As always, when the design draft is ready, we’ll present design for your review under the open-spec branches of repository: https://github.com/officedev/office-js-docs.
Thanks!
Office Extensibility Team
20 comments
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Charles Walker
commented
Any news on this topic ?
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Hervy
commented
Hi team, some update would be really appreciated.
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Tie
commented
Hi team, I was told that there should have been some news around the 12th of May. So is there any update?
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Thorsten Hans commented
hey team, any update on this one?
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Hector David
commented
#jirabot
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Anonymous
commented
This is going to be a huge on Excel lovers.
Looking forward to an update on this.
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Andy Comley
commented
Its hard to see how any addin for Excel can look like its working alongside Excel without this feature. At the moment Excel addins look totally disconnected with the rest of Excel functionality. Users want close integration between addins and Excel - so the ability to hook into the formula mechanism is a key part of that.
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Bob
commented
Why was this important feature released in first version? And even more it is not scheduled in recent release? Without it, I don't think the Office API can support us to do a real addin product.
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Hervy
commented
Agree with guys below. Some status update is needed. For us this is critical.
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Sathish Raju
commented
This is very critical for us. Please provide update.
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atti
commented
Please provide some feedback what is the actual status and when do you plan to start implementation?
This is critical feature!
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Yuki K
commented
Any updates on this? it has been a while.
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Eric Lacroix commented
Please keep me posted on progress
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Rudy Cortembert
commented
Please make sure one UDF can populate a table/array "à la Bloomberg".
Thanks -
Scott Harrison
commented
Will this feature include the use of user-defined functions with formula arrays? This would greatly help our use case.
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atti
commented
One more idea, would it be possible to support also clustering of the formulas?
I mean there is quite a lot custom formulas that perform some operation on DB (retrieving data for instance) and such formulas usually flood the DB with requests unless some "custom" clustering is performed (like invoking two sequential calculations to get the formulas in first one and then return the values in the second). It would be extremely useful to have support for such scenario internally.
I know there is concept of ASYNC formulas but that does not solve the problem.
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atti
commented
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atti
commented
Must have feature for transferring of many existing addins to the new JS API stuff from the legacy frameworks (SDK, COM, VSTO, VBA).
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Michael Brennan
commented
I agree this would be an extremely powerful addition the JS object model. User defined functions/formulas would allow users to take control of where data should be returned within their Excel workbooks. This is a very common requirement when reporting is considered, for example building a dynamic Financial report/statement in Excel which can be refreshed requires a high level of Excel proficiency and lots of manual work to build.
The common way this is solved on desktop Excel is to allow users to insert custom financial formulas which understand the source accounting/ERP system and then allow the user to quickly build their Financial layout around the custom formulas.
The following would need to be supported:
1. Ability to write custom functions in Javascript
2. Have Excel 2013 / Excel Online recognize and allow access to these functions when a user references the function in Excel (e.g. =CustomFunctionName), Excel should allow users to interact with these custom functions in the same manner as existing functions.
3. Allow custom functions to be filled in using the 'Function Arguments' UI which is available for standard Excel functions.
4. Custom functions should refresh when the 'Calculate Now (F9)' feature is called.
5. Custom functions should as far as is possible replicate the same capabilities as current desktop Excel User Defined Functions. -
Mathias Raacke
commented
It should be possible to create user defined functions in Excel web apps.