I’ve been quiet lately, but I’ve been putting in a lot of new work. As some of you know, I teach Computational and Quantitative Finance at Columbia and use this library in that course. I revamped the xll12 library to generate documentation that can be built with Sandcastle Help File Builder and integrated with the Help on this Function link in the Function Wizard.

My students use the library to get a front row seat with traders: if you give a trader an Excel spreadsheet they will look at it. It is nearly impossible to get them to schedule a meeting where you can get their attention for any length of time, but spreadsheets are their world and they will quickly tell you what they like, what you got wrong, and, oh, yeah, BTW can you get it do this too?

One thing I learned from Mark Joshi (of xlw fame) is that you have to make things simple. People give up easily when they run into a problem. It takes a lot of work to make things simple.

I am still working on getting a CA so I can sign add-ins and set up a WebDAV server so people don’t even need to download the add-in/spreadsheet/help file. Just waiting on D&B to update my company in their database to move forward.

What I need help on is expert users to start pounding on the code and maybe even give pull requests. I’ve set up a repository at https://github.com/xlladdins/main. You can build it with VS 2017.

It is not as simple as it should be yet, but I will help you get going if you find this interesting. Follow your passion.