back to article Quip away, but Microsoft Excel 365's REST APIs win the day

Salesforce has splashed out $582m on what some hail as its alternative to MS Word. Without spending anything, Microsoft has shown the true meaning of power. For years, it has been macro makers who have done the daily work of making Office more and more useful to end users, embedding it more into daily working life. Now, as …

  1. Mike Shepherd

    Huh?

    Huh?

    1. Spasticus Autisticus
      Unhappy

      Re: Huh?

      Advertorial?

      16 paragraphs - only 4 didn't feature the name Microsoft. Welcome to the new owners of The Register.

      1. h4rm0ny

        Re: Huh?

        It's an article on a Microsoft technology. And you're damning it for using the word Microsoft?

      2. sabroni Silver badge

        Advertorial?

        "When Microsoft changed things up with the new ribbon interface in Office 2007, customers got a nasty shock and people clung to the ageing versions of their favourite suite."

        That's some top quality advertising for Office 2003.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Huh?

      THat's what I was thinking. The only thing I could think of would be to use an API to generate Excel graphs. A graphing API isn't such massive news, so what is it?

      The ability to add numbers together? I'm fairly certain most programming languages can do that already...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Huh?

        Come to think of it, an API to generate Excel spreadsheets onto Office 365 would make sense (eg: plum your sales figures straight into the accounting departments spreadsheets ) .

        It wouldn't be remotely interesting or newsworthy, but it would at least be logical.

        1. nematoad
          Headmaster

          Re: Huh?

          "...plum your sales figures straight into the accounting departments spreadsheets"

          No, that's called cherry picking.

          Spelling!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a tangled web we weave

    I can't get over the horror of embedding subscription cloud spreadsheets in the web. It actually makes me nostalgic for ActiveX.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe I'm old, but I still can't believe that businesses allow their data to be placed anywhere off premise, other than backups.

    1. Hans 1
      Facepalm

      >Maybe I'm old, but I still can't believe that businesses allow their data to be placed anywhere off premise, other than backups.

      Not only that, when comes the day to migrate the data off-of MS' cloud, ouch, that is gonna be haaaaard and paaaaainful... basically, they are shafting themselves with 15 foot barge-poles ...

      And, you have absolutely no control of where the data is held, they can claim the data is in France, Ireland or whatever, but how do you know for sure they have not copied it to the states for NSA's inspection ? How do you know your data is safe, they allow you to encrypt it, but who knows, MS might have a master key ... or can siphon your key otherwise ... who knows ...

      Don't trust a convict, why trust MS ?????

    2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Can the downvoters please

      explain why they downvoted a very simple and straightforward post?

      Perhaps they have been infected by the zika-cloud virus and are scared of going anywhere outside their little cloud bubble?

      I really don't know but the thought of trusting MS with their new T's & C's with anything is just wierd.

      given them all your contacts yet? Have those contacts been send spam advertising? go on, I'm sure we'd like to know.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Trollface

        Re: Can the downvoters please

        > explain why they downvoted a very simple and straightforward post?

        Poor career choices ( ----> )

    3. Dr Who

      Yup you're old

      Years ago my company used to licence a copy, at great expense, of the Post Office PAF file, with regular updates arriving on tape which had to be laboriously loaded into our in house system.

      Now - we use PostCodeAnywhere of course. Yes, we depend on a third party for this, but so what? We depend on many third party companies to do business, not least our utilities suppliers, accountants, logistics companies, Internet service providers and so on ad infinitum.

      With IT, it's not outsourcing that's the issue, it's how you arrange your outsourced services and who you outsource them to that matters.

      In this interconnected world, where as many or more of our users are remote as are office based, the geographical location of the systems is neither here nor there. Even firewall's, DMZs, and intrusion detection systems are increasingly irrelevant in a world where the distinction between your internal and public networks is ever more blurred. You need to defend each system individually, not the perimeter.

      I'll stick my neck out even further. Anyone who still believes there's an advantage to running an in house data centre where they can touch the hardware and see the blinking lights is hopelessly out of date. If you know what you're doing, you can deliver far more reliable, far better performing, far more functional systems by outsourcing (cloud or otherwise) than you can in house.

      PS I'm old too.

      1. Ragarath

        Re: Yup you're old

        Wow just wow.

        There is nothing wrong with outsourcing and cloud use. There is also still a huge advantage of having in house kit and edge devices. Darn, I wish you good luck protecting all you small devices that do not have the capacity or grunt to defend themselves when connected to the internet and not behind an edge device.

        Legislation also comes into this but is not mentioned in your post. You using PostCodeAnywhere is you using a service from a third party not you using a third party to host all your information. If their service is bad (giving you the wrong info) you change to someone else. Not a problem. If a cloud service is bad, they have all your data. Even if you take it out, they have all your data. Where is this stored? Have they archived it?

        Your post comes across as too rosy and that cloud can't be wrong. I have several systems here that will never go cloud based because of the information contained in them. There is no chance in hell they would go outside my edge devices. On the other hand there are systems that can and have gone. It is a balance.

        1. Dr Who

          Re: Yup you're old

          @Ragarth. Totally agree. I just get frustrated with the large contingent on El Reg who are anti-cloud full stop. They base their entire opinion on services such as Office 360 or SalesForce where in effect you lose control. There are many shades of grey between in house and the Office 360 / SalesForce type scenario. Horses for courses and all that.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Yup you're old

            There is a time and a place for just about everything.

            IMHO, putting your whole business into Azure or AWS is just foolish. Those providers can hold you and your business to ransom as and when they see fit. When they raise their prices how many will just look at the effort needed to extract their data and move it to another supplier and simply pay the ransom?

            Putting your Public facing stuff into the Cloud makes perfect sense. but the systems that hold all that IP that is so important to your company or you customer lists? I'd rather have that totally under my control behind triple firewalls and even air gapped if needed.

            all it will take is one leak on Azure or AWS of data into MS or Amazon ad slinging and the exodus of clients will make a 30ft tsuami seem like a ripple on a pond.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Yup you're old

              Putting your data into the cloud is like putting your Johnson into a glory hole.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Yup you're old

              > IMHO, putting your whole business into Azure or AWS is just foolish. Those providers can hold you and your business to ransom as and when they see fit.

              Yeah, it is only against the law and would trash their brand, putting them out of business essentially overnight.

      2. DonL

        Re: Yup you're old

        "we depend on a third party for this, but so what? We depend on many third party companies to do business, not least our utilities suppliers, accountants, logistics companies, Internet service providers"

        And if any of them went bankrupt and suddenly dissappeared you could just switch to another one and be done with it. While if your cloud provider dissolves in thin air, you could switch to another one but it's useless if your business critical data is still stuck at the old one.

        Personally, I don't understand why people don't see that distinction.

        1. BrianT

          Re: your business critical data is still stuck at the old one

          Does the word "backup" mean nothing to you?

          1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

            Re: Does the word "backup" mean nothing to you?

            "Backup" is not generally synonymous with "instant availability".

            The concept of "mirroring" is more so. Perhaps if the market hadn't been so eager to ditch Netware and such products as SFT-III then the world would be in a much more enlightened place right now.

      3. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: Talking about PAF and other third-party data

        De facto data that is sourced from third-parties, such as the PAF data makes a compelling reason to not have it hosted locally. However, there are reasons why I would still be in the "laborious loading to in house system" camp.

        Firstly because there are ways to automate such tasks.

        Secondly, there are systems around, that people maintain, that (rightly or wrongly), use such things as keys into databases. If such a system is to be maintained, there is a need to know that the system being relied upon to give irrefutable results might have changed since the last time that the data was used to say, tag a business to a postcode.

        There needs to be some kind of trail that shows for example, that any business operating in the London W1 postcode area has changed postcodes (ok a few years ago now, but many businesses still don't know what their postcode is). With the manual downloading process this is easy to ascertain.

        How many accounts systems, upon producing a "certified copy" of an invoice to a customer will inadvertently use current data when producing that copy, rather than what was correct at the time the invoice was raised?

        This will, of course, never happen where traditional IT Consultants (of the right calibre) roam the corridors, but in outsourcing your data you are outsourcing your knowledge-base too and the attention to detail is not there because there is no incentive to: economies of scale being the reason why.

        It's things like this that will trip up the company that thinks that anything emanating from an official source in the cloud is perfect.

        P.S. I'm old too. I clearly remember the first time I tried to migrate a Microsoft Macro from one version of Office to another.

  4. gobaskof
    Trollface

    300 excel functions!?

    I can just imagine the tears of joy streaming down the faces of web app programmers. Previously stuck in an environment where they are forced to use awful Turing complete languages, they will now have OVER 300 excel functions!!! It is like Christmas came early! I hope they integrate MS paint next, how can I design websites without a shitty spray can?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yawn

    I'm still waiting for Excel Online to support the WEBSERVICE() function that Excel desktop has. Seems crazy that the shiny shiny web thing can't speak to other web services.

    I've actually got LibreOffice on the home Mint machine, with dropbox integration , but the spouse complains that LO wibbles on Excel files even though it claims full compatibility. So EO is the name of the compromise.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

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