• JavaScript equations coming to Excel. What on earth are they thinking?

    Posted on May 9, 2018 at 13:28 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    I was going to let this one fly by, but I just can’t.

    If you’re in the Office Insider program, you can now use custom functions in Excel that are written in… my sweet lord… JavaScript.

    The Office Dev Center describes the functions thusly:

    Custom functions (similar to user-defined functions, or UDFs), enable developers to add any JavaScript function to Excel using an add-in. Users can then access custom functions like any other native function in Excel (such as =SUM()). … Custom functions are now available in Developer Preview on Windows, Mac, and Excel Online.

    My jaw dropped when I heard that in the aftermath of a Build presentation yesterday. In fact, I figured I heard it wrong. But no.

    What’s wrong with making JavaScript available as an in-the-sheet programming language? As Lawrence Abrams at BleepingComputer notes, “within hours” a security researcher, Chase Dardaman, figured out a way to put the CoinHive in-browser JavaScript miner inside a spreadsheet.

    As if 25 years of macro malware wasn’t enough.

    Office Patches/Security ,
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