Linux in Excel

(github.com)

91 points | by radeeyate 7 hours ago ago

25 comments

  • nogajun 4 hours ago

    Linux can run on Excel, but not Excel on Linux.

    • grishka an hour ago

      Excel, at least old versions, does run on Linux using Wine.

  • ivolimmen 12 minutes ago

    Question remains: can you run Windows in LibreOffice under Linux?

  • tinktank 5 hours ago

    This is the insanity that I miss.

  • euroderf an hour ago

    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.

  • valorzard 4 hours ago

    Would this same trick work on LibreOffice Calc?

    • shakna 3 hours ago

      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).

  • dmitrygr 5 hours ago

    “ 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

    • jayd16 4 hours ago

      Excshell

    • zipping1549 3 hours ago

      Still funny

      • AshamedCaptain a minute ago

        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...

  • padde 3 hours ago

    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?

  • apexalpha 20 minutes ago

    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.

  • tolien 2 hours ago

    Next step is to get Doom working on it :-)

  • necovek 6 hours ago

    It runs on neither MacOS nor Excel cloud though, as it depends on a Windows DLL.

    • pjmlp 2 hours ago

      Microsoft 365 is the reason why the new add-in model is focused on Web technologies, and mostly deprecated going forward for new forward.

      • jeroenhd 2 hours ago

        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".

    • yjftsjthsd-h 5 hours ago

      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?

    • nxobject 5 hours ago

      mini-rv32ima is incredibly compact -- I imagine a translation to VBA might not be too hard.

  • userbinator 6 hours ago

    Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to run WINE in it, and thus another Excel inside that.

  • ngcazz 2 hours ago

    I thought for a second this would be about the use of a spreadsheet as a general computation device.

  • aussieguy1234 3 hours ago

    Excel > Linux > Wine > Excel...to infinity?

  • nailer 7 hours ago

    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.