The recent announcement from Microsoft about the release of Office Scripts is both exciting and curious.

Exciting because the kind of solution I show in this video will soon be possible with Excel in the Cloud – the online version of Excel. So it will work from tablets and Macs, and phones (I expect).

Curious because programming Excel didn’t become as mainstream as it should have. It’s been over 25 years. There are people who like to believe that programming Excel is somehow ‘not Excel’. That a spreadsheet must remain an electronic version of an A3 analysis sheet of paper (but with formulas), and nothing more.

With that history behind the inclusion of powerful features in Excel, how likely is Office Scripts going to have a better outcome?

Anyway, watch the video.

It shows how an unlimited number of people can collaborate on spreadsheets around the world on an accounting model – and also do that without someone having to manage the process.

Of course, at the moment this works on Excel on a PC only. With Office Scripts the expectation is that it will work (a version of it) on any device.

There’s a demo you can download and play with.

TBA – there’s also a tutorial that gives you a step-by-step, so you can build it yourself. (it also demonstrates the idea behind the Excel Contactless Playbook I am currently working on).

Hiran de Silva

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