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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Spreadsheets traditionally don’t support iteration (loops) or recursion. In Excel you had to go the VBA route for actual programming.

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In my hands they do

That is the spirit.

In the distant future:

    $ ./myapp.xlsx --port 8080
    My App listening on port 8080
    Loaded 1337 rows

The future is now with Microsoft Excel Web Services, which is part of SharePoint.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-dev...

In other hands, I have seen Excel spreadsheet hundred-products pricelists become a freaking tangle of merged cells, multiple rows for products, spelling mistakes, multiple spaces everywhere, and price cells hand-formatted. And I had to export the contents to machine readable .csv...

That sounds like a nightmare to untangle. On the other hand, it would be very satisfying to go from the original pricelists to a new, cleaned format!

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