I wish I could find the interview of Michael Saylor who described building his software business, MicroStrategy, around Excel...and how he had to make executive decisions to continue with it while people tried to talk him out of it...going all the way back to the mid 90's. I wondered if he was still offering products around Excel so I googled: Excel MicroStrategy It appears he is still offering products around it, including some reliance on REST API capability: I have worked with REST API capability in Excel and found it to be feasible for intermittent price probes and trading control, wherever an exchange or broker exposed an API. I must admit though, support for real time price info is sketchy to lacking to non existent within VBA. It may have existed with WinSock but that appears to be no more. This appears to be an executive decision within Microsoft. There IS a plugin, though, called Cryptosheets, that will monitor real time quotes for several exchanges and an abundance of symbols. However, it's probable the plugin was developed in the VB.Net environment using something like Visual Studio Code. But it's also possible it was developed in C#, also within Visual Studio Code. Both these languages, especially C#, are supported with rich libraries of crowd sourced code, including REST and real time price info capability. This is probable because there is something Cryptosheets does that for sure can't be done with VBA alone. I suggest this is possible because I once used VB.Net to add a basic "Add-in" to Excel (just a bare bones proof of concept). Anything you can do with VB.Net can also be done with C#, the latter having the most crowd sourced support. That's the main reason anyone might want to use C#, imo. A good question might be, what does Microstrategy use for charting? For sure SQL can be exploited from within any Excel plugin, if not VBA code itself.
Correction: I meant to say Visual Studio 2024, not to be confused with Visual Studio Code. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio "Visual Studio Tools for Office Visual Studio Tools for Office is a SDK and an add-in for Visual Studio that includes tools for developing for the Microsoft Office suite. Previously (for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005) it was a separate SKU that supported only Visual C# and Visual Basic languages or was included in the Team Suite. With Visual Studio 2008, it is no longer a separate SKU but is included with Professional and higher editions. A separate runtime is required when deploying VSTO solutions." Again, this is probably how MicroStrategy developed, develops, and maintains it's add-ons ("plugins") for the Office Suite, but especially Excel. Visual Studio makes crowd sourcing of code extremely easy (from local libraries and also from GitHub). In the hands of Visual Studio, Excel is a little toy to be played with.
I must admit, though, that I made an executive decision to go all in on TradingView + Pinescript. Pinescript is evolving/improving constantly enough over that past seven years that I'm confident it can execute pretty much any scenario I can think of. In this scheme, there is no development time needed to perfect a data feed, or nicely charted results. It appears to be the fastest way to model and test some pretty sophisticated ideas. It lets you start right in, immediately, with the logic of your income oriented algorithms. From Pinescript, ideas can be ported/migrated to other languages like C# or Python, not to mention MetaQuotes (or even VBA), if speed or automation (or complexity) becomes an issue, once proof of concept has been proved. Pinescript greatly facilitate manual trading with TradingView's growing number of broker/exchange partners. Automation is accomplished through an abundance of third parties and/or your own creativity. (See my thread on using email alerts to trigger trades).
Use a cell with a reference in it. Make is X, or blank as the only two options in data validation. I do it all the time.
Yeah I know I've done it lol! It's labour intensive! You have right click each one to manually link each cell in format control...and then you have to dedicate a column just for true/false toggle... Excel checkbox tutorial: duration 11:26 Google sheets checkbox tutorial: duration 1:03
It is not just that every knows excel. It is that most business computers are running Windows so an excel file is safe while Google Sheets is blocked in many instances. It is a great UI if you need to do calculations on a small amount of data with a visual interface. MS has also largely left it alone too and not ruined it like most of their software over time. Sure, VBA is a complete disaster. It would be hard to add python to Excel in a more useless way than what was settled on. Most use cases with Excel are not being replaced with a Julia script. There is just no reason. A visual data table with its own file format that automatically opens on the operating system most business is using is hard to unseat. Microsoft would make sure a competitor never gets off the ground with network effects. I would also say the open source alternatives like OpenOffice calc that I have used are really not that good either.