For a research project we're doing, I'm looking for some Excel experts - if you (or someone you know) have done something non-trivial with Excel, please let me know! We are thinking of doing some additions to the spreadsheet programming model and are curious how people currently solve the kind of problems we are interested in - so we want to ask people to solve a series of task and see how they would think about them. (I know it is hard to say who is "Excel expert" - ideally, we are looking for people who will have some thoughts about different ways of structuring larger things or encoding some kind of simulations using Excel.)
Not an Excel expert. But I do know that a few years back, Excel added a grossly underappreciated feature: user-defined functions.
Amazing upgrade to usability and flexibility.
At my previous company, engineers built a bunch of (climate, energy, economic, etc.) models with Excel. At some point (before my time) we even built an Excel to C compiler, so we could run these models faster in production 😅 I could try and get in touch with them, if you're interested.
@Guyren Howe I know! I think it is interesting how little attention this got - perhaps it will just take time, or perhaps it is used by more advanced users - but it may also be that this is too big step from the baseline model of spreadsheets... It would deserve some serious examination!
@Xavier Lambein That sounds super interesting - if you have any friendly contacts there, I would love to get in touch with them. Excel to C sounds like an cough cough interesting project 😄 but I bet there is a plenty of similar things all over the industry. What would be the best way to get in touch? If by email, mine is tomas@tomasp.net.
I'll try and reach out to some people who still work there, and if it works out I'll put yall in touch 🙂