Before long you'll have a different LLM embedded in each of a series of cells, and they'll each have an opinion on what you are doing elsewhere in the sheet, and your One True Trusted Overview LLM (named OTTO) will survey them and take a vote and get back to you.
Excel is not even Excel anymore. It’s different on Windows, Mac, web, mobile… And there’s different bugs across all them! My favorite ones have to do with regional defaults.
I was going to say that first versions were technically that, but apparently Excel was never released for DOS, Excel 2.0 was already a Windows application, and 1.0 was only available on Mac.
I don't know that I miss it, it's still around if you look for it. Even here, I find several posts a month doing something this insane and fun, let alone finding out about my friends' personal projects.
“ The emulator is built as a seperate dll which is loaded by the VBA macro. The VBA macro calls the emulator in the dll and gets the output and writes it into the cells in the spreadsheet. ”
Not really in excel. Excel is just the console. Emulator is a native DLL
I was expecting something like the cells being used as registers and the computer being implemented in the spreadsheet itself. Loading an emulator via a DLL and using the spreadsheet as a line oriented display feels like cheating.
By the same logic I can also put a crappy emulator in a dll and make notepad load it via a hook. Linux on notepad.exe. should I make that into a HN post too?
Now that I mention it, I think someone already posted that on HN...
Any practical use cases come to mind? Could you actually interact from Excel cells with Linux userspace, e.g. running a cell's value through a bash script as if applying a formula?
It's focused on web tech as COM add-ins are a huge source of security and instability in Office apps. It's also more flexible for developers as they can modify the backend without having to update the client and the deployment model is significantly easier for admins.
Regarding COM, it wouldn't be that bad when using COM Servers.
However I do agree that although COM as idea is enticing, Microsoft keeps failing to deliver a productive way to use it, despite how much they keep focusing on it for Windows extensibility and API delivery since Vista.
On the other hand, if you can get it to work in the new O365 architecture using whatever JS API they're exposing now, you can call it "cloud-based" or maybe even "serverless".
Wouldn't help with cloud of course, but there's WINE for macOS, isn't there? Or does that version of Excel not allow loading binary libraries such that you could hand it a DLL if WINE translated it?
I just posted the ‘doom on a lightning adapter’ story, and saw this in submissions. I’ll have to tip my hat to the better bizarre ‘X on Y’ post. You win this time, radeeyate.
Before long you'll have a different LLM embedded in each of a series of cells, and they'll each have an opinion on what you are doing elsewhere in the sheet, and your One True Trusted Overview LLM (named OTTO) will survey them and take a vote and get back to you.
Linux can run on Excel, but not Excel on Linux.
Excel is not even Excel anymore. It’s different on Windows, Mac, web, mobile… And there’s different bugs across all them! My favorite ones have to do with regional defaults.
Excel, at least old versions, does run on Linux using Wine.
Then it may be possible to run Excel on Linux in Excel
I’d like to see bare-metal Excel.
I was going to say that first versions were technically that, but apparently Excel was never released for DOS, Excel 2.0 was already a Windows application, and 1.0 was only available on Mac.
This is the insanity that I miss.
I don't know that I miss it, it's still around if you look for it. Even here, I find several posts a month doing something this insane and fun, let alone finding out about my friends' personal projects.
“ The emulator is built as a seperate dll which is loaded by the VBA macro. The VBA macro calls the emulator in the dll and gets the output and writes it into the cells in the spreadsheet. ”
Not really in excel. Excel is just the console. Emulator is a native DLL
I was expecting something like the cells being used as registers and the computer being implemented in the spreadsheet itself. Loading an emulator via a DLL and using the spreadsheet as a line oriented display feels like cheating.
I still think this is pretty neat even if it's just acting like the console.
Still funny
By the same logic I can also put a crappy emulator in a dll and make notepad load it via a hook. Linux on notepad.exe. should I make that into a HN post too?
Now that I mention it, I think someone already posted that on HN...
It's not Linux, but here's DOOM in Notepad:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/how-to-get-doom-runni...
Coulda shoulda woulda…
We've seen better on HN. Much better.
Ditto with a ZMachine being called from a VIM plugin...
A native one would be emulating a DOS 8086 PC with PostScript (some people already did a ZMachine emulator).
Excshell
Execell
Question remains: can you run Windows in LibreOffice under Linux?
I was about to say, "If it can run Doom...", but actually the deamons in Windows are worse and even more hellish than those in Doom.
linux and the hit game doom are the things hackers always put on something first. any eletronic
Would this same trick work on LibreOffice Calc?
Probably not. It calls out to a DLL library for most of the work. One that, unfortunately, is 32bit.
Libre Calc can load 64bit Excel plugins, but not 32bit (at the moment).
Any practical use cases come to mind? Could you actually interact from Excel cells with Linux userspace, e.g. running a cell's value through a bash script as if applying a formula?
It runs on neither MacOS nor Excel cloud though, as it depends on a Windows DLL.
Microsoft 365 is the reason why the new add-in model is focused on Web technologies, and mostly deprecated going forward for new forward.
It's focused on web tech as COM add-ins are a huge source of security and instability in Office apps. It's also more flexible for developers as they can modify the backend without having to update the client and the deployment model is significantly easier for admins.
The .NET ones are also going away.
Regarding COM, it wouldn't be that bad when using COM Servers.
However I do agree that although COM as idea is enticing, Microsoft keeps failing to deliver a productive way to use it, despite how much they keep focusing on it for Windows extensibility and API delivery since Vista.
On the other hand, if you can get it to work in the new O365 architecture using whatever JS API they're exposing now, you can call it "cloud-based" or maybe even "serverless".
Wouldn't help with cloud of course, but there's WINE for macOS, isn't there? Or does that version of Excel not allow loading binary libraries such that you could hand it a DLL if WINE translated it?
mini-rv32ima is incredibly compact -- I imagine a translation to VBA might not be too hard.
Next step is to get Doom working on it :-)
Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to run WINE in it, and thus another Excel inside that.
Can it run Lotus 1-2-3, though? https://github.com/taviso/123elf
qemu-i386->export X with serial->SLIP->TCPIP->wine with X exported->Excel
Dog slow, but Turing complete.
Wow! We are in awe that you managed to run Linux on a database tool designed to query Bigdata tables sharded over 72 sheets.
Very impressive.
Greetings,
Deloitte.
I thought for a second this would be about the use of a spreadsheet as a general computation device.
Excel > Linux > Wine > Excel...to infinity?
I just posted the ‘doom on a lightning adapter’ story, and saw this in submissions. I’ll have to tip my hat to the better bizarre ‘X on Y’ post. You win this time, radeeyate.
I support you to one up them with `Lightning adapter on Excel`