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Looks awesome. One fundamental issue I always faced with Excel calculations of any kind (formulas or vba) is the lack of ability to source control cleanly (binary format plus data and code are intermingled). This weakness is the other side of the spreadsheet’s greatest strength which is low friction experimentation with data. Does this product attempt to do anything here?


Thanks!

You can version control the code you write with QueryStorm, to an extent. There are basically two kinds of apps you can build with this: extension apps (where you build general excel functionality) and workbook apps (where you automate a particular workbook).

The code for extension apps is stored in a folder on your machine, and you can version control that easily.

The code for workbook apps is stored inside workbooks. While there's no version control functionality in QueryStorm, it does let you export code from a workbook into a folder, as well as import code from a folder into a workbook project. There are context menu commands for this in the code explorer pane. This lets you decouple the code from the workbook.

Basically, for version controlling code in a workbook, you'd have to export the code into a folder and version control it there. Exporting into a folder will clear everything from the folder except hidden stuff like the ".git" folder so your git repository will be safe. Not a perfect solution, but it can be done.


Have you considered implementing a project folder structure, so that the workbook and the source code could be version controlled together in git, but the IDE would import and export the source automatically from/to the workbook?


You mean add the workbook itself into the folder as binary file to include in source control? I haven't, but it might make sense, to keep the workbook in sync with the source code.


Since XLSX etc. use Microsoft's Open Packaging Convention (a ZIP container consisting of mostly plain text), consider adding native support for unpacking and normalizing the payloads so they can be trivially diffed by existing source control systems.


It's something to consider, for sure. Perhaps there's an easy win to be had there.


Can you also import it from the folder?


Yeah, you can import the folder back into the project and it will replace all of the existing files with the ones from the folder.




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