Interesting to see Microsoft's reseach team in the UK influencing Excel. NB: Lambda is in beta. Not sure when or if this will be rolled out but I wonder how this could be harnessed by GC.
Speed: would some calculations be quicker to crunch in Excel? There seems to some situations where this is already the case. No dotNET VM garbage collection etc overheads?
Sheet defined functions look like a powerful way to modularise functionality in Excel. Would it be useful to convert GCScript functions to Excel so that some of the processing can be done there? ETL?
Hi Dominic,These are some good suggestions. As of now, GC does not do anything more than reading and writing excel sheets. But further extending this capability as per your suggestion would be a powerful feature.
Lambda functions are also available in GCScript for example
function (x) { return x +1; }
Equivalent Lambda expression of the above function would be
x => x + 1
if we want to create a list of 100 random value we can simply write
FilledList(100, x => Random(50, 200))
"In particular, lambda expressions make it easier to call functions that take other functions as arguments. For example, Nodes is a built-in function that returns all nodes in the GC model: "
1. GC calling functions in Excel: I can see this being very useful for a lot of engineers who already have lots of their calcs sizing beams or ducts etc defined in Excel.
2. Excel calling functions in GC: I can see this being very useful for a lot of engineers who have calcs in Excel but need some geometric querying or problem-solving in GC. Eg length or angle etc for those beams and ducts.
3. Excel functions running in GC: probably available already programmatically, but it would be good to generate the functions in the Excel UI, then pass the 'code' to GC to allow it to be used as a native function that does not have to cross the app boundaries or have Excel running.
4. GC functions running in Excel : ditto. GC functions or nodes stored as Sheet-defined functions in Excel?