No idea, haven't seen this until now. Hopefully they provide a mechanism for allowing legitimate addins to get around it. Perhaps using a code signing cert (which I do) or an EV certificate would be appropriate. Security has been a bit of nightmare with Excel addins. I've had to deal with false positives on and off again a bunch of times already. First it was windows smart screen, then antivirus vendors every so often. It's a slog...
Cool. How can I turn off the animated cursor movement in Excel? And Outlook? Drives me crazy. I keep submitting feedback. Even a registry hack is fine.
May I suggest a new feature? I imagine there's no real hard reason why Data Validation won't take dynamic arrays. It would be amazing to use UNIQUE or even FILTER in the Custom format. I've tried all sorts of workarounds including defining named ranges, using INDIRECT, etc. but it seems like I inevitably need to create a range for Data Validation to work
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>
Oh boy you don’t know what our culture looks like. It’s more “it’s cool that people are building on top of it and we want to figure out how we can make it easier”
Oh Microsoft the company is not to be trusted and is not your friend. It’s a huge company with many employees and products. Moreover I can’t attest to any other group’s culture - I can only say what we do in Excel.
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 ;)
I always got the feeling that because it's such a key product the Excel team was basically its own organisation within the wider corporation and as a result had a lot more freedom to make its own choices.
(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)
I got this impression as well. I worked on a team two years back building out a very complex Excel plugin using Excel.js. The SDK has quite a few quirks and we ran into some problems along the way, but the team at Microsoft responsible for it was happy to help and interested in hearing feedback and features we wanted. A positive experience :)
A little off topic but will Typescript support ever come to desktop Excel or is it just going to remain on the web version? Office Scripts are great but bit of a bummer I can only write them for web.
I hope it does work out for the original author and he deserves it but there have been cases before where concepts have been taken from their originator and implemented by the large corporate with no cash or even credit given.
I always felt that there was more to that story than what was reported. My understanding is they reached out to him to interview for a PM role to develop an official "AppGet" at Microsoft but, for whatever reason, he didn't get the job. Maybe the interviews didn't go well? Maybe there were some red flags somewhere? Who knows. But it didn't really sound to me like they acted in bad faith.
Interesting, the story I've heard from various Senior Engineers is that Microsoft poached him by offering him a ton of money. Crazy to think they all repeated a tech urban legend I guess
