Consider a macro-free approach to the Excel-design

[xstof]

Excel does support Power Query, which is a capability that can be used to use for example an external json file as a datasource. Power Query can pull in the json, massage the data and make it available in certain tables. This would avoid having to deal with macro's. The user action is then a simple push on the "refresh" button. Happy to try this out when I get some bandwidth.

[erjosito]

Great idea @xstof ! If you have some bandwidth to try this out, I think it would be a great addition!

[r-henriques]

@xstof An option here could be to leverage Excel JS add-ins, which are deployable through the Office Store. Never tried it but assuming we can make http requests from an add-in this might be a clean way to do this.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/overview/excel-add-ins-reference-overview

Relying on HTML and JS could even make it reusable, i.e. hostable in Excel or a web server somewhere.

[erjosito]

Somehow relevant to this, I have started playing with the automatic generation of macro-free .xlsx files, have a look in the spreadsheet folder.

I am using the Python module openpyxl, it does not support all Excel features so I needed to simplify the spreadsheet, but the result is IMHO acceptable.

[erjosito]

See #11 .

Additional tests carried out with Power Query (no integration with Cosmos DB, the integration with Table Storage requires the account's master key) and Office Scripts (can be disabled at the tenant level, they need to be stored in a common repository).

The main approach for a macro-free alternative is today the web UI, which we are working on actively.