Excel JavaScript UDFs: Straight to the Point

Excel users are used to build custom functions—called user-defined functions (UDFs)—in Windows and Mac versions of the application. UDFs can be simply written in Visual Basic Editor (VBE) using the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language. UDFs are not portable to Excel Online and Excel for iOS due to the missing VBA capability on these platforms. Therefore, Microsoft has improved the JavaScript API that was already being used for Office add-in development to allow developers to create custom functions attached to the add-ins. These custom functions can be used like any other native functions or UDFs in Excel. While Microsoft calls these functions JavaScript custom functions, they can also be called JavaScript UDFs, which is the name used in this book. This book shows the process of creating JavaScript UDFs in Excel in Developer Preview for Office Insider program subscribers.

About the Author

Suat M. Ozgur has more than 20 years of experience developing applications with various programming and scripting languages mainly including Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Objective C (for mobile development), PHP, and JavaScript. He is a Certified Database Developer working with MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server databases. He is actively developing database driven web applications such as Product / Manufacturing Automation, Customer Relationship Management, and Content Management Systems by using Zend Framework and Doctrine ORM. He's been also writing tutorials at his own blog—smozgur.com.

Suat is enjoying life with his wife, Muge, and their cat, Cuma.