Excel Addin Software Frameworks — Extending the Microsoft Office Platform
Although the desktop may be slowly dying as phones, tablets, and other devices encroach, many businesses and consumers remain loyal fans and active users of Microsoft Office and Excel. According to Microsoft, there were 1.2 Billion users of Office desktop and 60 million users of Office 365 in the cloud as of March 2016; the latter amount more than doubled to 135 million active users in April 2018. Excel’s core capabilities include a flexible tabular data representation indexed by rows and columns, a catalog of built-in functions, a charting module, a data import module, and a rich programming model using VBA. For heavy, data intensive commercial and academic users of Excel, there is a need to extends Excel’s features with custom calculations, new data sources, real-time refresh, and embedded GUI’s.
In this series, I will be covering several advanced topics for extending Excel’s core capabilities.
- Excel Addin Framework Choices
- UDF
- Embedded GUI
- RTD
- Portability
- Deployment
- Troubleshooting
There are are several criteria when deciding which Excel add-in framework to use.
If you are looking to build an Excel product suite or family of add-ins, then I strongly encourage you to examine Add-in Express or Excel DNA. Both are fully featured and have broad language support (unlike PyXLL), and both are much easier to use than the native Microsoft VSTO libraries. Both have active user communities with 1000’s of developers each.
If you intend to support other Office products such as Word or Outlook and are also not comfortable with using open source software, then choosing Add-in Express makes wise sense from a long-term maintenance, TCO perspective.
If you intend to develop Excel add-ins which use native, platform features that are idiosyncratic to a specific version of Office (which I do NOT recommend), then use VSTO.
If you are budget conscious and are developing a PoC or MVP for just Excel, then choosing Excel DNA and Net Office is a solid starting point that you can build upon.
References
- http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/
- https://www.windowscentral.com/there-are-now-12-billion-office-users-60-million-office-365-commercial-customers
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-office-365-now-has-120-million-business-users/
- https://www.componentsource.com/product/add-in-express-net-office/prices
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