Apex Data Solutions, LLC, released its powerful new Microsoft Office add-in, AcceλerateTM for Microsoft 365, today, making it possible for users of Microsoft’s Excel 2016 and higher to break outside the constraints of document-centric Office artifacts, and integrate the data and knowledge contained in these “data silos” with the internet, the enterprise, and every place in between, leveraging whole new worlds of proven solutions, in ways that were previously impossible.
“Initial focus is on Excel,” says Greg Matton, CEO of Apex Data Solutions. “It’s the ultimate business application, found everywhere, used by almost everyone at home, at school, in businesses and enterprises of all size, for almost every purpose under the sun. And that is where the biggest data interoperability problems lie – in these data silos that exist everywhere, and pose serious data integration as well as information integrity problems, which are the problems about which we as a company care most.”
The initial release of Acceλerate brings two entirely different development traditions – Scheme, a dialect in the venerable Lisp tradition known for its tiny core, ease of learning, and syntactic freedom, and Common Language Runtime, or CLR – into one innovative, feature packed platform for adding user defined functions right into Excel.
“This isn’t just any Scheme,” says Bob Calco, Chief Architect and Lead Developer at Apex. “This is a standards-compliant R6RS Scheme, with all its metaprogramming features, built on top of the open source, ECMA standard .NET runtime, with access to everything it has to offer. On the one hand, you have this profoundly malleable language that has been around at least as long as Excel itself, and proven its capabilities in math- and data-intensive applications in academia and industry over many decades. On the other hand you have .NET, with its vast ecosystem of commercial and open source frameworks and libraries. Combining these two makes it really easy to bring really powerful abstractions right into the spreadsheet.”
Calco goes on to explain that Microsoft’s approach, to introduce LAMBDA functions right inside Excel’s formula language, brings amazing intrinsic value to Excel in terms of making it an almost Turing-complete language in its own right. “I’m a huge fan of where they are going with this!” he says. “But our approach, which is truly aligned with Microsoft’s overall direction for Excel, is completely orthogonal and adds the extrinsic value of the fusion of these two incredibly powerful technology stacks, and additional tools that will play nice right inside Excel’s everyday user experience. Moreover, we even make these new ‘super powers’ available to Excel users who aren’t yet able to upgrade to the latest version of Excel in Microsoft 365.”
Greg adds, “Acceλerate 365 will empower customers to multiply the return on their investment in Microsoft 365 and legacy Microsoft Office applications with the ultimate add-in for transforming hard-drive bound document artifacts into “live” digital enterprise assets.“
Acceλerate for Microsoft 365 is available on a single activation license at a very low cost of $99 per year, per user, and is intended for independent power users of Excel. Apex will be releasing a professional version of Accelerate later this year. The Pro version will significantly expand Acceλerate’s enterprise reach by targeting core data interoperability challenges. In addition, it will make it possible to build enterprise- and internet-ready data-savvy solutions that can be deployed easily to any platform, and on any cloud.
For more information regarding Apex Data Solutions or AcceλerateTM for Microsoft 365, email your inquiry to information@apexdatasolutions.com, or visit their website at apexdatasolutions.com and submit a Contact form.