Live Deedle -> Excel visualization

[hmansell]

A thought on better Deedle frame -> Excel integration.

Excel (2013+ I think) supports pulling data for a pivot table/pivot chart from an atom feed. A while ago I prototyped a real-time risk server that computes risk atoms in real-time and then the Excel pivot table pivots them in some way (or not at all - you can just show the data as-is). It seems pretty scalable but the refresh on each update was a bit clunky.

Anyway, for Deedle, we could have a command to show a Deedle frame in Excel. It would run an HTTP server in the F# process and create an Atom endpoint for the frame. Then it would add a pivot table to your Excel session, pointing to that endpoint. This would allow you to slice-and-dice the frame in Excel quite nicely. We could also hook into events generated when you add/remove columns from a data frame and have that tell the pivot table to update.

I think it would be sweet…

Of course, we could also do this by saving files, etc., which might be easier.

[buybackoff]

That would be interesting. ServiceStack allows to self-host a server even without admin rights, this example just works on .NET 3.5: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Self-hosting

[tpetricek]

Just for reference, the old Excel visualization that was developed at BlueMountain and I got a kind permission to use it in one of my demos is available here

Though I really like the idea of a live Deedle <-> Excel visualization! I'm marking this as up-for-grabs and we'll see if anyone wants to contribute :-)