office365 and future of Excel apps

[Lolo]

Hello,

with the coming of office365, I'm wondering what will be the impact on Excel and the development of tool in Excel.

I have read that there is a web version, and a computer version. I have seen that we could develop in javascript with a tool called Napa, but not really clear to me. Have some info on that ?

Do you think this will change a lot the way we think Excel +VBA app ?
Do you think we should already learn this new ? Do you invest already invest time on new concepts of this new version.

A lot of question about this new platform...
thank you for your answers.

 

[Debraj]

Hi Lolo..

Office 365.. Apps.. its a great feature to rule the android world.. where android are developing lots of apps at the same time... Windows phone also giving few apps to work on, and Office 365 / 2013 is always take care for touch screen and mobile service.

For starting point. I would recommend you to visit those sites..

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/06/18/roadmap-for-apps-for-office-vsto-and-vba.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/office/jj220060(v=office.15)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220065.aspx

and for few sample to play witj..

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/apps-for-excel-FX102825373.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/api-tutorial-for-office-WA104077907.aspx

and I dont know, it will able to relace Add-Ins or not.. but crossing finger, as all Apps are easily distributable and works great in Touch PC's.. which is the primary focus for Office 365.

best of luck.

 

[ThrottleWorks]

It will be great if we get following features in future versions of excel.
Though these are not must-have, but will make life a bit more fun.

Here is my little list...

Change interface of Comment
The current design of Comment is basic. MS could make it visually more appealing.
Something similar to rounded rectangle (Insert, Shapes) with more pleasant background color by default.

The current pale yellow is a bit appalling. A toolbox should appear as soon as we insert a comment, similar to pivot table.

Application username is not that necessary in the comment, if required user will type his/her name in the comment.

If they could provide an insert background option, it will be fun !

Provide more information about the chart on mouse hover
The current information populated on mouse hovering on the chart area is very limited.
The user should get an option to customized this display.

More information about the chart on hover will provide more visibility to the chart.
Provide option to make the chart dynamic. Experts here have helped others on how to make charts dynamic but these are used on individual case.

At present there is very little by MS in default toolbox to make it flexible.
A relatively easy embedded option to make it dynamic will help in long way.

Also, there should be an option to “PLAY” the chart, just the way we play PPT slide.
Data should be categorized as per the user priority and should be displayed one after other.

At the end the entire chart will be displayed. This clip should run for 30-60 seconds.
Rather than multi filtering the data, this will be helpful.

Integration of more complex rules in the Conditional formatting
Highlight row based on the value is just one off example.
Highlight row based on date value (due date) with intervals of weekly or monthly as required.

I am aware that we can design formulas to get these results but in-built option will be more fool proof.

Providing more options for Split screen
At present there is only one option for split. It would be better If we can view multiple worksheets in a single view by split.

That will be much better than Alt Tab or manually resizing the screens.

Resize as a function
Resize is very helpful in VBA for selecting ranges. If we get this as a function it will be awesome.

Since the resize function accepts numbers as arguments we can make it much more dynamic for selecting ranges.

Give a function to return color index
So many questions we have for “how to identify cell based on the cell color”.
If we could get a function such as IsColor that will be to good.

Provide more options for Clear Format