5. Extending Excel with Excel Apps and Add-Ins

Although Excel can do amazing things, it cannot do everything. Plenty of niche industries need more functions or more specialized operations than what are available in Excel.

Sometimes, someone recognizes a common need. After seeing dozens of questions in Excel newsgroups about converting uppercase to lowercase, for example, a developer might offer an add-in to make that task easier than the current five-step process.

Prior to Excel 2013, these add-ins would be written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to create a regular add-in or in Visual Studio to create a COM add-in. Starting in Excel 2013, the Excel team debuts the Excel App. Found under Insert, Apps for Office, an Excel App is built in ...

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